ON A ( RED ) WING AND A PRAYER!
This brave little thrush is one of the most cheering sights of a Scots winter... yet the hardship they face on the way almost defies belief
IT was a cool winter Saturday in Edinburgh’s Morningside Cemetery – fading snow, reduced to curls and crisps of ice, crunching pleasantly underfoot; and I heard the calls first, insistent ‘tzzseep, tzzseep, tzzseep…’
then I realised there was a whole flock of them, sociable, bumblesome, bouncing from the trees onto the grass, chattering around gravestones, repeatedly landing and then taking off again, and at a second glance I realised we were honoured with the presence of Norwegian redwings.
they finally noticed my presence and flew as one to the trees, tzzseep-tzzseeping indignantly until I had made myself scarce.
the smallest members of the thrush family, turdus iliacus, can be readily recognised by the scarlet of its underwing and its very smart face, with a white eyebrow stripe and dark brown cheeks.
But its behaviour is the first giveaway. Unlike the fiercely territorial robin, the redwing is intensely sociable. You never see a redwing without seeing loads of others, and – after all, they are just passing through on their mercy dash from a worse winter elsewhere – they are distinctly demob-happy, bobbing around for a day or two without discipline or purpose.
We are very used to them on Lewis. For a couple of days in October, redwings are everywhere. then they vanish until the return leg of their vacation in March or April.
We think of migratory birds as summer visitors: the fleet swallow, the shy corncrake, the dastardly cuckoo. But in Scotland, we also enjoy winter ones – geese most audibly, but the Norwegian redwing most charmingly, with its dashing good looks and endearing naivete.
You never see them on their longhaul flight – Scotland’s redwings travel largely from Iceland – because they fly by night, if only when the sky is clear and when the wind is from the east. And only the insistent ‘tzzseep, tzzseep’ overhead betrays their presence – a haunting, beautiful sound ‘so high, so clear and so bright,’ marvelled one writer, ‘that it might have been a star crying out.’
BY day, they pause to enjoy our autumn and winter fruit – rowan and hawthorn berries, the last brambles, the windfall apples. And for some reason they get along particularly well with another member of the thrush family, the fieldfare, a rather bigger bird of golden chest and yellow bill with the bearing of a butler – also a visitor from the frozen north.
But there is an important behavioural difference. the redwing is happy to forage in woodland; the fieldfare is loath to leave open ground, as its name suggests.
Redwing movements are hard to predict, for the redwing’s migration is ‘eruptive’ rather than seasonal, determined by the onset of cruellest winter and the immediate availability of food. Nor – unlike the faithful swallow – do they always return to the same locality.
Ringing has proven that Norwegian redwings who enjoy a British break might in subsequent winters sojourn in lands as diverse as Spain or turkey.
On mild days, they are soft, if exuberant, singers; and males like to perform from on high, perching atop a tree with a commanding view of the country about. Unusually, a cock redwing only ever has one phrase – the same combination of notes sung again and again – and all males in that vicinity will sing the same one.
they are dreadfully vulnerable. thousands perish each year when beset by storms on that terrible, non-stop 500-mile flight over the ocean. Many more die during protracted frost and snow, especially this late in winter, when all fruit has been devoured and their only recourse is to quit garden and hedgerow and scratch for worms, grubs and snails on the ground. Writers who lived in the decades when British winters were far harder than they are now attested to the redwing’s frailty. ‘A redwing starved to death used to be no unfrequent sight in the course of a winter’s ramble,’ wrote C A Johns, while John Henry Salter never forgot how often, of a spring, he found ‘the dried remains of redwings in the crevices into which they crept for shelter when the frost was cruel’.
But, each spring, the survivors return to the bogs and birchwoods of Iceland and Scandinavia, nesting on the ground, laying five to six brown-speckled blue eggs.
the father plays no part in brooding but hangs conscientiously around to help with feeding. Redwings fledge quickly – just 14 days after hatching – and Mum and Dad usually then raise a second clutch.
It is hard to put a number on our redwings, given their unpredictable movements, but it is thought a million sojourn in Britain every year. And some, in fact, never leave, for we have a tiny breeding population permanently resident in the Highlands, in certain woods and groves north of the Great Glen – though no more than 16 pairs; and many fear for their future as the climate changes.
Considering that redwings descend upon us each year and are a reliable mark of imminent winter, there is surprisingly little related folklore.
In Kent though, the bird was once known as the ‘herring-spear,’ as fishermen would wait for the unmistakeable sound of massed redwings in nocturnal flight over the sea and know that the shoaling autumn herring would not be far behind.
THE poet John Clare wrote of the birds ‘that come and go on winter’s chilling wind’ and, in Irish, redwings are charmingly dubbed deargán sneachta, the ‘red snow-birds’.
In August 2017 one dead Norwegian redwing won global publicity – for, found frozen in glacial ice in the Oppdal mountains, carbondating fast established it was 4,200 years old. Even its internal organs were perfectly preserved.
‘that means we can study a lot of the biology and the history of the bird and we can compare the bird that lived essentially in the Stone Age to birds that are living here today,’ said enthused researcher Jorgen Rosvold. ‘We can look at the effects of pollution and the DNA to see if it’s changed a lot and we can look at the diet of the bird… It’s quite a treasure.’
But it is the heroism of this little winter thrush that inspires most. Earlier this year a dead redwing was found in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia – 2,421 miles from where it had been ringed on Channock Chase in the East Midlands in October 2016.
these, then, are assuredly birds of staggering range and endurance, and of the stoutest heart, as annually they tzzseep-tzzseep towards us in the cold night sky.