Redwings on the Hawthorn
December 28, 2025 · 3 min read
Minus 5 °C on the morning of 26 December and the bird bath was ice an inch thick. I put the kettle water on it, as I do, and went back inside to find the hawthorn full of redwings. I counted 28 on the first pass and 31 on the second, with birds dropping in and out from the apple tree, so call it thirty. They had been about in the fields since November but this was the first time they had come into the garden, which they only do when the ground is frozen and the hedgerow berries are running low.
They are smaller than a song thrush and neater, with that cream stripe over the eye and the rust-red flank that gives them their name and that you only really see when they lift a wing. They were quiet apart from a thin seep call and the sound of berries being torn off. By the evening of the 27th the hawthorn, which had been heavy with fruit since September, was bare. Two days. I had thought it would last the winter.
A single fieldfare sat in the top of the apple tree for most of both days, bigger and greyer, chacking at the redwings and occasionally driving them off a branch. Fieldfares do this; one bird will try to claim a whole tree and defend it. It did not stop the others eating the lot. Underneath, the blackbirds, four of them, picked up what fell and fought each other over it.
On the river this morning, in the same cold, a pair of goosanders on the pool below the weir: the drake clean white and dark green, the duck grey with that red-brown head and the crest that looks wind-blown. I get them most winters but never for long. They dived constantly and I watched the drake come up with a small fish, probably a minnow, twice in ten minutes. The kingfisher was on the usual branch, puffed up against the cold and not moving. A little egret stood in the shallows below the footbridge, which five years ago would have been worth a phone call to somebody.
Frost is forecast to continue until New Year. I have put out extra apples, halved, under the hedge for the thrushes. The redwings have not been back; there is nothing here for them now.