Viking raiders failing to set sail

One swallow does not make a summer, but nothing declares winter more spectacularly than a flock of handsome fieldfares foraging on frosty ground.

These hardy Viking raiders, with their chocolate, ochre and battleship grey plumage, sneer at the cold as they hunt for worms and scavenge berries in the frigid countryside.

The glacial winter of 1963 was made all the more bearable by scratching away ice patterns from my bedroom window to see if any fieldfares were seeking sanctuary in our garden.

My yearning to see the Nordic thrushes had been inspired by the great Victorian artist Archibald Thorburn, whose painting of a pair of fieldfares was on the front cover of my cherished Observer’s Book of Birds.

The fieldfares never did pay a visit during that long, bleak winter. But, over the years, I have had many an encounter with these dandies of the thrush family, whether flying high over migration hotspots on autumn journeys south or singing loudly in Arctic forests under the midnight sun.

That said, early 2022 remains a winter when fieldfares are conspicuous by their absence. Redwings – fellow Scandinavian thrushes – abound, but in late January you would expect to be hearing fieldfare flocks uttering loud “chack” calls across fields, and even entering suburbia to find food to sustain them in wintry temperatures.

The British Trust for Ornithology’s BirdTrack and Garden BirdWatch observers are reporting below average numbers, a trend birdwatchers are also recording on late winter walks.

Euro Bird Portal, with its online maps showing bird numbers by the month, offers an explanation as to why fieldfare numbers are down across the UK.

Last January, a chilly southern Scandinavia was almost bereft of fieldfares, but charts for the first weeks of 2022 show how large numbers are still lingering across Norway, Sweden and Finland, with winter temperatures remaining above freezing.

Maybe this is a sign of coming winters in an age of climate change, and the fieldfare will become as tantalising a northern visitor to our shores as the waxwing.

Large numbers of fieldfares are still lingering in Scandinavia