The ring ouzel – a species of concern
One of the birds you could just possibly see on this week’s walk at this time of year is a ring ouzel. It is like a blackbird but the male has a crescent moon on its chest. It is a red-listed species of high conservation concern. Late September and October are the best times for what should be a red-letter sighting if you know what you are looking at. I’ve always been intrigued by this moorland dweller. It has the cache of Heathcliff and the tempestuous Brontë dramas because this odd and lonely bird would have been very much part of their scenery, flitting secretly about among the crags, cloughs, gullies and ghylls of their cold and lonely world, seen almost as a shadow, then gone: almost a figment of imagination. It has even more that spirit of place than the curlew whose mournful song haunts the moors.
The ouzel’s short but sweet song is the very essence of this acerbic land, for life can be hard and dangerous at that extremity and only the briefest moments can be given to tender speculation. But that is why it comes here from the south, to find cool, tumbling streams with mossy banks where it can hide its nest under some outcrop of rock. Sometimes the nest is placed halfway down a cliff high above the glittering sea. Edges of mine-shafts, even inside a deserted shepherd’s shealing (shed), perhaps a bothy on a mountain side have been chosen to rear the young.
If you have ever seen one of these nests of dead grass you might have noticed that unlike a blackbird, the ouzel does not use dried mud to reinforce the cup, yet reinforces the lining by carefully crisscrossing each grass stem with weft and warp that holds the young secure almost as in a net.
Why is it called an ouzel? Ask the Germans. Today a blackbird to them is an amsel, and that’s the key. Saxon tribes brought the original name amsala to England and we pronounced it osle through poor diction. The name fitted both ring ouzel and blackbird before taxonomy cleared the identities. Shakespeare reported in Henry IV that Justice Silence was ‘Alas, a black ouzel’, meaning a black sheep.
Germany then realised that ring ouzels were not exactly blackbirds so gave them their own name of ringdrossel: ‘thrush with a ring marking.’ Because of their furtive and enigmatic isolation ring ouzels were always regarded with suspicion by the ancients. They scurried away at the sight of humans, hid themselves in dense bracken, chipped a few notes of song like a stone-breaker trying to make a living in the harsh terrain, then gave a bright whistle, and vanished. They are vanishing today for all the wrong reasons though as the climate heats up. They have gone from Exmoor and all but gone from Dartmoor, but their stronghold now is in the Highlands and on beyond in Norway.
They used to breed in Sussex, and that is why you might see one in autumn as they fly out of the country to France. The South Downs almost resemble the bleak uplands of Brontë land, or did centuries ago. Think of the dramas of Thomas Hardy and his savage stories of the Wessex chalk uplands as Tess and the Mayor of Casterbridge among many others struggled with their destinies.