It was that dusk moment when the brown-green of the fields merged with the green-brown of the trees and Great Shacklow Wood ran a chromatic scale down its steep slope into gathering, unresolved darkness by the river; and over everything was palest ice-blue.
It was then that the redwings went to roost – a dozen silhouettes twisting and appearing almost to fall sideways with loss of control, as if anxiety were harassing them out of the sky. Then they entered the darkness and were gone. But what is it with redwings and those nerves?
Of our five common thrushes, it is the least approachable. You almost never see them well or in prolonged view. Fieldfares process across the open fields in a head up, chest out bounding action. Song thrushes, if shier birds, will fly to the treetops on first spring evenings, when the winter gnats emerge, and fill the world with declamatory song. Blackbirds are so attached to our gardens that they can become semi-domesticated. But redwings often appear terrified. Many times I’ve caught them on the woodland floor; they squirt away in an action that looks both precise yet unpredictable, like pips squeezed between forefinger and thumb.
Hundreds of thousands of them arrive each winter from Scandinavia or Iceland, where you imagine that they barely encounter our species. At roughly 16 to the kilogram, surely they were seldom considered prey. Even the call – an explosive, sibilant ziih or tsiiih – carries a sense of something held under intense pressure, a valve or ring-pull releasing volatile gas.
Yet there is this other side to redwings. You hear them at night, or on evenings without moon or stars, over town or city, and look up to imagine better how they might feel. For these birds have flown for hours, sometimes night after night across unknown territories, perhaps for the first time in their lives, held together through all that blackness by a loose net of calls, one to another across the sky. You are filled with a sense of mystery – awe even, and an inkling of a courage that you have never known or will possess.
• 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
