Bird of the Month: Brambling John Mcewen
As bird lovers know, finches are exceptionally easy on the eye.
Most of the family dozen seen in Britain could be contenders for first prize in a beauty contest, with the brambling ( Fringilla montifringilla) to the fore.
Regarded as the ‘northern chaffinch’, it has a bolder plumage. It is black where the chaffinch is grey. It has white underparts: the most noticeable difference in both sexes is the bright, white rump. It is unique among the finch dozen in being only a winter migrant. Sometimes a million-plus arrive from Scandinavia and Russia in autumn, leaving as late as May.
Bramblings’ favourite food is beech mast. The copper of the mast and dead beech leaves blend with their tortoiseshell colour; the white flurry of a disturbed flock is a snowy sign of winter.
As their beech-mast preference shows, they are not berry- or seed-eaters in the first instance; unlike chaffinches, with which they nonetheless often congregate. Their name accordingly does not derive from a taste for brambles, although they do like to roost in thorny scrub, but is probably a corruption of ‘brindle’ – in other words, russet with strokes of another colour.
The ‘forgotten finch’ comes from the unpredictability of its weatherdependent migrations. Hence the breadth of its migrant numbers: 45,0001.8 million in the latest UK population estimate ( British Birds). It means even birdwatchers may never see one. This is borne out by my books of bird poetry: the principal finches are all celebrated but not the brambling.
The same applied in pastoral times. George Muirhead wrote in The Birds of Berwickshire (1889) that it was seen ‘every year’ but its visits were ‘erratic and uncertain’. He explained: ‘The “Cock o’ the North” is mostly associated in our minds with severe weather of winter, when deep snow covers the level expanse of the Merse, and curlers are on the ice; for then it is seen in small numbers about the stackyards, feeding with the linnets and chaffinches.’
In mild weather, it took to ‘open fields’ and ‘plantations where it feeds upon the beech-mast. Large flocks were seen in the beech woods at Paxton in the autumn of 1874’, but December snow left ‘only a few remaining about the farm-steadings’.
Like most winter migrants, bramblings follow food, invariably from north to south; hence ‘Cock o’ the North’. This can cause huge flocks. In 1981, 150,000 on Merseyside; and, for a few weeks in the winter of 1951/52, 70 million descended on the beech woods near Hünibach, Switzerland – the largest gathering of a bird ever recorded. The global population is declining yet still estimated at 100-200 million.
The brambling nests in conifer and birch forests across northern Europe and the Palearctic. Tardy males in Britain may sing their mating song. Nests are sometimes reported in Scotland, but few have been verified.