Wild Words with Kirsteen Bell - 14.11.24

I’m not even close to the woods before I hear a roiling mass of squeaks and curls, chortles and chips, a soundtrack sped up then run backwards and layered over itself again and again. So loud and persistent is the noise that it even swells briefly over the metallic hammering of a rockbreaker from the nearby landfill. If dictionaries had audio descriptions, clustered around the word ‘cacophony’ would be the calls of winter thrushes on the hunt for fruit.

I’ve been away for almost a fortnight and thought I might have missed this storming of the woods. We get only a fraction of the thousands of fieldfare and redwing that migrate to the north of Scotland from their breeding grounds in Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and western Russia. They come every year though, a burst of life when the Highland hills are giving up their green.

When I left for my trip in the last week of October, the rowans were still heavy with berries. Now they are finally bare.

The birds come for our autumn fruit and milder winters. Flocks flutter in like leaves lifted from branches by wind, breezing through this small belt of woodland in a brief, noisy, gathering, before moving on, leaving the rowan exhausted of their fruit. A few dried berries are left dotted on the branches here and there, and a scattering in amongst the leaf litter looks like the debris at the end of a party.

I always thought our visitors were fieldfare, but my newly downloaded Merlin Bird ID app tells me it hears redwings too. I sit by the scope in the garden, waiting for some to stray into the trees by the house so I can watch them more closely.

They throng to and fro across the leafless birch, and the oaks still crinkling with brown leaves, searching for any rowan that they might have missed on the last pass.

These, I am sure, are fieldfare: grey-blue blurs in the air, their undersides flashing white in the low morning sun. Then I spot two wee ones in the trailing upper branches of a silver birch - they stay long enough for me to train the glass on their perches, and even before I have increased the magnification I can see the rust glow on the side of their breast, the distinct creamy-white line above their eye.

Little redwings, in amongst the fieldfare. Birds of a not-quite-the-same-feather flocking together, both drawn to the Highlands’ rowan red bounty.