Bird of the Month: Redwing

John Mcewen

Gerry Cambridge’s poem of the ‘Scandinavian thrushes, almost always together’, talks of the redwing ( Turdus iliacus) and fieldfare ( Turdus pilaris).

In the poem, preference is given to redwings, the lesser in size and character of the two migrants:

The slimmer sidekicks with the rust-red stain like a wound on their flanks. I hear their high thin see-ap! These nights, up in the starry emptinesses, over the lit sandstone of the church in Bothwell chiming its human hours. Notes in the night air, over the gantried pubs; over me too, out to the shop for milk and bread on the snell pavement; and see-ap! – reminder of the planetary migrations, the succour of a different scale of time. From Turdus iliacus & Turdus pilaris

The redwing comes to Britain from September to April. It is as gentle as its ‘see-ap’ call suggests, in contrast to the ‘chuckchuck’ of its burlier fieldfare cousin which abandons the countryside for urban parks and gardens only during extended periods of freezing weather.

One sunny 1st November, W H Hudson, on a ramble between Wells-next-the-sea and Stiffkey on the north Norfolk coast, had his day made memorable when a redwing perched close by. ‘He is, I think, the most charming of the thrushes… There is a wildness, a freshness, in the feeling he always gives me,’ he wrote ( Adventures Among Birds).

Hudson was particularly flattered because redwings were ‘exceedingly shy’.

Worms are their food of choice, which makes them more field than hedgerow birds. They are the most vulnerable thrush to glacial winters. In 1962/63, almost the entire British migration was thought to have perished.

As Gerry Cambridge’s poem recalls, they are memorably nocturnal in passage. On 13th November 2019, Pete Morris, a Birdquest tour guide, and a spotting group reckoned 22,100 came in at nightfall to roost in woodland on Longbridge Fell, Lancashire.

In his memoir, A Diplomat Off Duty, Sir Francis Lindley described the redwing from the perspective of Norway, where he was British Minister (1923-29).

The earliest to arrive in the ministerial garden was on 14th March. For him, it was the redwing that symbolised the Norwegian spring. ‘All day, and nearly all through the light night, he keeps up a monotonous chant of three or four loud notes on a rising scale, repeated at intervals of a few seconds. You hear him … inside or outside the town, wherever there are trees.’

He wondered why the species, considering it likes a temperate climate, did not live in Britain the whole year.

At the last count, in 2017, only 24 pairs stayed to breed, all in Scotland’s far north.