It’s been a mild autumn this year, with perhaps only one morning with a light frost so far, and the temperatures have remained above freezing even into November. The year’s moving inexorably on, though, and you can feel it in the pinewoods, where the gloaming starts even earlier than in the open. In among the Scots pines, the golds and yellows of the leaves that still linger on some of the birches and the bright splashes of red rowan berries seem to glow in the low autumn sun. There are still one or two lovely heads of purple devil’s‑bit scabious too.
A wren trills loudly from somewhere inside an old juniper bush, but for a good 20 minutes the woods are near-silent. I’m distracted by tiny movements to my left, accompanied by the chatter of birdcalls. Suddenly there’s a frenzy of to-ing and fro‑ing between birches, a larch, the pines and junipers – great, blue and coal tits, restlessly flitting, beginning to gather in their winter flocks.
From somewhere among them, above me, I hear a high trill that’s almost more like a giggle. My binoculars keep landing on coal tit after coal tit, but then, suspended upside down on the branch of a Scots pine, a momentarily clear view gifts me what I’m looking for. With a colour palette not dissimilar to a coal tit, and with a black bib and collar, a lovely black crescent framing its face, it’s the little black and white crest that’s the giveaway – a crested tit, and then another close by.
These lovely little birds are such a part of these pinewoods, nesting in holes sometimes left by woodpeckers in dead trees, but you can go for weeks without hearing them, and then you do. They dart in and out of the pine needles and the thick swathes of lichens that cling to the trees, rooting for insects and pine seeds. When one flies on to a leafless birch branch, with the mid‑afternoon low sun momentarily behind it, the silhouette with its crest is unmistakable and so beautiful. A split second later, it’s gone.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
