Winter thrush

This isn't what I expected to be posting today: R, who was in Stratford having his car serviced, called at around 10am to tell me that he'd just counted twenty two tufted ducks on the Avon, so I zoomed over to photograph them. Ducks found and recorded, I joined R in town for coffee and cake, and then made my way back to Old Town along the top side of the river.

As I walked through the RSC gardens I started using my Merlin app to identify the bird songs and calls I could hear all around me, and I was still recording, and watching the different species IDs pop up on the screen, when I arrived in Holy Trinity church yard. "Redwing" said the app - to my surprise, because I could neither see nor hear any thrushes - but by watching the screen closely and noting what I could hear each time the name lit up, I gradually tuned myself to the call, and eventually made my way to a holly tree, whose last few berries were indeed being squabbled over by a little group of redwings.

Shooting up into a tall holly tree, against the light, isn't ideal, and I was slowly backing away, trying to get a better angle without losing sight of the thrushes altogether, when two of them flew down to the ground bickering, and a short kerfuffle ensued. One then flew up onto the top of this gravestone, just a few metres away from me, and stood there gazing around in a lordly fashion at what it evidently feels is its domain. For two minutes the bird stood and I shot, and then it flew back to the tree, leaving me with.... quite a large number of redwing photos to cull and process.

The RSPB puts the UK breeding population of redwings at twenty four pairs - which is an almost unbelievably specific number, though who am I to tell them their business? Whether it's right or wrong, the point is that to us this is a winter visitor: between October and March the population across Britain and Ireland swells to an estimated 690,000 birds. The majority of these are migrants from Scandinavia, and tend to be found in the southern half of England, while incomers from Iceland are more likely to overwinter in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. They travel in flocks (often flocking with our other migrant winter thrush, the fieldfare), and roam widely in search of food, with no obvious loyalty to areas adopted in previous winters.

In summer the redwing eats a range of invertebrates. Arriving in the UK in the autumn it favours fruits such as berries and windfall apples, but when these are exhausted it turns to digging for earthworms. The oldest recorded individual was seventeen years old, which immediately makes me wonder about all the thousands of miles that bird had travelled during its life, and all the places it had seen. And finally, the call can be heard here. It's surprisingly diffident for a bird that can be assertive to the point of aggression, and I'm impressed that Merlin managed to pick it out of the general cacophony in Holy Trinity church yard.