Category: Birds

The call is unmistakeable.  A harsh, grating chak-a-chack chack as a stocky, long-tailed thrush, or more likely a small flock of them, rises up from a field or from the hedges where they have been feasting on the autumn bounty of hips and haws.  Fieldfares.  We often associate birds with particular seasons and times of year – the first cuckoo of spring, the skylark pouring out his heart in high summer, and the swallows gathering on the wires in early autumn.  For me, the fieldfare’s chattering call – like a piece of rusty agricultural equipment – is the sure sign that winter is really upon us.  Their arrival in East Anglia often coincides with the first influxes of cold air from Scandinavia, and it’s hard not to think of them as Viking invaders, come to plunder our rich native berry stocks.  They usually arrive in company with other ‘winter thrushes’ like redwings and continental blackbirds and song thrushes, but the fieldfares are the largest and most dominant of these.  They are a slightly paradoxical combination of shyness and boldness.  They are easily alarmed by any human approach and before you can get close they tend to rise up in a loud clacking flock, flashing their silvery-white underwings.  They’ll then perch warily high up in a tree, where they all face in exactly the same direction rather than distributing themselves in a random pattern, as most other birds do, before suddenly taking flight again with a further volley of alarm calls.   Maybe this nervy anxiety is some sort of biological folk-memory from Victorian times when roasted fieldfare was a highly regarded amuse bouche for gourmet dinners and the birds were hunted and shot in large numbers.   

By contrast with this apparent timidity, fieldfares are fierce in seeing off much larger birds like crows and birds of prey, which they buzz and dive-bomb in formation. On the ground, they also bully smaller birds competing for the same food supplies.  In really hard weather they’ll come into orchards and even into our gardens to gorge on the fallen apples and you can watch them driving off blackbirds in a flurry of aggressive short-range assaults. When you see fieldfares close-up like this they are very handsome birds, with a grey head and rump, a reddish-brown back and a prominent arrow-head pattern of markings running down the chest. Chaucer called them ‘the frosty fieldfares’, which neatly connects both their time of arrival and their physical appearance.  That description also catches something of their robust defiance of wintry weather.  It’s their time of year and they know how to handle it.  

Jeremy Mynott
3 December 2023  

It’s a quiet time of year in the woods.  You can sometimes ramble through the rides for quite a while before coming across a single bird.  But sooner or later you’re likely to hear a harsh cry, rather like the tearing of an old piece of linen. Watch closely and you may spot a plumpish, pinky-brown bird about the size of a jackdaw swoop on floppy wings from one side of the track to the other, flashing a conspicuous white rump.  If you get a closer view, you’ll see the bold black moustache and a splash of azure-blue on the wings.  It’s a jay, a common but shy member of the crow family.   

They have reason to be shy.  Game-keepers have often regarded them as a threat, though jays are in fact vegetarian for much of the year.  And those bright blue wing feathers were once greatly prized by the millinery trade as accessories for ladies’ hats, and they are still coveted by salmon fishermen, who fashion them into enticing ‘flies’.  

Jays are highly intelligent birds.  That distinctive rasping call is only one of the sounds they can make. They are great chatterers and mimics, imitating not only other birds, but also cats and dogs – and even telephones.  Their scientific name is Garrulus glandarius and while the first part of that refers (accurately) to their voices, the second part refers to their favourite food – acorns (Latin glandes).  They secrete hoards of them in autumn every year to keep themselves going when food gets scarce in winter.  They pluck the acorns directly from the trees and cache them for future use in little holes in the ground or under dead leaves.  Then later they exhibit their amazing powers of memory in retrieving these gourmet snacks from their hiding-places.  It has been estimated that a jay might hide and relocate some 5,000 acorns this way.  If you have ever wondered where you last left your spectacles or your car-keys you will appreciate the feat of brain-power this implies! Of course, they do miss a few and we then get an unexpected harvest next spring – new oak trees, planted in ideal conditions to foster their growth.

Which reminds me of a nice story I heard about the ancient Suffolk woodland called Staverton Thicks, near Butley Priory.  The ground there was farmed by monks up to the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Henry the Eighth’s reign.  The monks were then given notice to quit, but at their request they were granted the right to take just one more crop from the land.  So they planted acorns …  

Jeremy Mynott
November 2023