Winter Birdsong

Let's have another try at writing and posting something every day . . . beginning with this:

I last wrote about birdsong early last spring, and the other day I came across a recording I made in April of the dawn chorus in the wood behind our house; it was lovely to listen to it again as the days head towards their shortest. But there is quite a lot of birdsong to hear at this time of the year too, and the other morning I was amazed at the sheer abundance of song I could hear from my back porch.
Almost all of it emanated from a single bird which, though I couldn’t see it, I knew to be a mistle thrush. This is the largest of our resident thrushes, and it sings more or less throughout the year, and at almost any hour. It will often sing in bad weather, and has been given the name “storm cock” in recognition of this. As it happened, my garden was full of blackbirds at the time - our resident birds are joined by continental visitors for the winter - but though noisy enough in our trees and quite quarrelsome, they weren’t singing, and won’t until the spring.

From October onwards, however, quite a few of our native songbirds will sing, at least on mild and sunny days - not their full spring songs, but trial bursts of song, as though in the early stages of rehearsals. Some garden birds, the dunnock among them, will sing pretty much their full spring song if you happen to get a mild day in December or January, and great tits can often be found giving their distinctive “tea-cher” call from high branches, like the tall conifer two or three houses away down our road.

The mistle thrush is also a high branch specialist, and I was rather disappointed not to manage to see the one that was singing so loudly that morning. Usually they find a very prominent position - there’s a telegraph pole over the road from us, at the top of one of the back gardens opposite, that often gets used, for example. The mistle thrush really is quite a big bird, and I've been approached by people claiming to have seen “a big brown spotted bird, far too large to be a thrush” in their garden - well, I can be pretty sure that they will have seen a thrush, just a rather larger one than a song thrush or blackbird. Its song is very inventive, as are the songs of the other two just mentioned, but rather raucous, and with the components less well connected. I can imagine the conductor saying, wearily, “Sing, please, don’t shout!”

Of course, the sweetest winter songster is the robin. Many birds sing to maintain a territory, but outside the breeding season many of our garden birds just flock together (which is why your garden can fluctuate from very full to almost completely empty!), and so don’t need to sing, just use their “keep together” calls. Robins, however, claim individual territories which they keep throughout the winter, so they need to sing, and they do, usually from a prominent vantage point that overlooks “their” patch. The winter song seems to me rather more plaintive than the one you’ll hear in the spring, built around falling sequences of notes in a minor key. It’s one of my favourite winter sounds, and, as with the mistle thrush, I have on occasions heard robins continue to sing well into the dark.