Garden birds in winter
By day, there’s not a lot of birdsong to enjoy in December, compared to, say, May. Most birds save their singing for breeding season: spring is when the dawn chorus (and evening chorus) happen, with song tailing off in summer and in all but a couple of cases, falling silent as birds moult in August, not to return until temperatures rise again; additionally, many summer visitors with good voices, such as most warblers, have migrated and won’t be back until next year. Robins, however, sing almost all year round to defend their territories – both males and females too. They can be fierce in defence of their home patch, and fights can go on to the death. Listen out for your local robins and if you can, help them get through winter by feeding them some dried mealworms, which you can get from pet food shops or garden centres – especially if the night-time temperatures get really low. And don’t forget to put water out for the birds each morning if everything freezes.
However, birds don’t just sing, they make sounds to raise the alarm or keep in contact with one another. The mistle thrush, which looks like a slightly fatter version of the spotty-chested song thrush, has a completely unique alarm call that’s usually described as being like a wooden football rattle; however, this description needs updating, as – let’s be honest – hardly anyone knows what one of those is these days. I used to see mistle thrushes regularly from the top deck of my bus to and from work when I lived in south London, and one day I got off a few stops early to see what they were. That’s when I first heard their rattling alarm call and began to explore the little park alongside my bus route that would eventually become a key location in my first novel. I still think of mistle thrushes with great affection today.
Thrushes of all kinds love winter berries, and mistle thrushes are so named due to their love of one type in particular: mistletoe. These balls of leaves and berries occur in mature trees and are semi-parasitic – though it would take a lot of them to harm their host. The sticky white berries, which appear in winter, are a favourite of mistle thrushes, which then poo the seeds out (or wipe their beaks on a nearby branch), thus ‘planting’ them on other trees. But here’s the interesting thing: while the mistle thrush is on the Red List, with numbers down by 58 per cent between 1967 and 2020, in recent years, some areas of the country have seen an upturn in mistletoe. This strange plant is very difficult to germinate on trees by hand, and had been on the wane in the UK since we got rid of most of our old apple orchards, one of its favourite hosts. The reason is thought to be climate change, albeit indirectly: milder winters have allowed more and more blackcaps to spend the winter here instead of just visiting for spring and summer, and yep, you’ve guessed it: blackcaps love mistletoe berries too.
Male starlings sing all year except when they’re in moult, but in winter their numbers are swelled by visitors from chilly northern Europe, giving us more opportunities to hear them perform. Have a listen to one using an app such as Merlin, or a reliable website like Xeno-Canto: as well as having an extraordinary repertoire of sounds, from rapid clicks to buzzes to wolf whistles, they are skilled mimics and will casually throw into their recital the ‘bip-bip’ when someone locks their car, a phone ringtone or snatches of other birds’ song. If you hear something from a nearby aerial that sounds like either a frisky builder or R2-D2, that’ll be a starling.
This is an edited extract from Homecoming: A Guided Journal to Lead You Back to Nature by Encounter’s creator Melissa Harrison, illustrated by Amanda Dilworth. You can order a copy by clicking here.
