I find I don’t much care how cold it is in winter, so long as the air is still. It’s the wind I don’t like! A good frosty day can be great walking weather, and the crunch underfoot is far better than the slurping sound of mud sucking at your boots.
Cold frosty days are really tough for wildlife, though, and we do need to make sure we provide for the birds and other creatures that visit our gardens. As long as we’ve lagged our pipes, we have water on tap, but hard frosts mean there’s nothing for birds to drink or to wash in. If you have a bird batch, keep it ice free and freshly supplied with water each day, and the birds will be very grateful! You can get some anti-freeze additives these days that are designed to be added to water put out for birds, without being harmful to them. I’ve only seen them, and haven’t used them, so I don’t know how effective they are, but I imagine they could be useful.
The winter thrushes, redwings and fieldfares, have arrived in some force. Driving over the top of the Long Mountain a week or two back, I simply had to stop the car and watch as wave after wave of fieldfares swept across, bouncing in and out of the hedges either side of the road. Redwings have been in our churchyards in some numbers, tackling the berries. When I had a big vicarage garden I used to get them there too, but these days the weather has to be really hard before I see them in my back yard!
Quite a few blackbirds and mistle thrushes also arrive as winter visitors, so you’ll see more of them in the winter than through the rest of the year. But the bird I’m hoping to see this year is the bright and exotic waxwing. These starling-sized birds arrive in some numbers every winter from their Arctic and sub-Arctic breeding grounds, but in some years you can get a lot, and some experts are speculating that this could be a “waxwing winter”. That’s when you start to get them this far west in the UK (“our” birds having mostly travelled from Finland).
They arrive and travel in flocks, and are quite distinctive, a pinkish buff-brown in colour, with a prominent crest and a black band across the eyes. The throat is also black, and the very tip of the tail bright yellow. The name comes from the red tips to its flight feathers that look like blobs of old-fashioned sealing-wax.
Waxwings love rowan berries, and this year we do have some in our garden, so who knows? But the place to see them these days is (would you believe) supermarket car parks. That’s because these are usually planted with good berry-producing bushes, just the kind of things waxwings love. So if you see a load of people with binoculars in the car park of your local Tesco or Morrison’s, look out for a mob of pinky-brown birds with crests!
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