Song thrush defends its musical title

JUST before the solstice, I spent a few days on the shores of Carlingford Lough. There was quite a good dawn chorus in the morning, to which the outstanding contributors were not the usual robins, but song thrushes. Although thrushes begin singing early in the year, the Carlingford ones were ahead of themselves, in full voice before the year had even turned. These fine vocalists have become scarce over much of the country but they seem to be thriving on the Cooley peninsula.

The thrushes have some of the world’s finest singers in their ranks. They are virtually unique among birds in being able to sing two notes at the same time. The name “thrush” may derive from their Latin “turdus”, which bird ringers consider highly appropriate. When caught, a thrush empties its bowels all over the ringer’s hands, turning bird bags and clothing a deep indelible purple from the berries the bird has been eating.

January and February are the best months to see thrushes; we have no less than five species here at this time of year. Redwings and fieldfares begin arriving in the autumn but their numbers increase dramatically in mid-winter when northern Europe freezes over. Fieldfares will be particularly conspicuous over the next few weeks as they hop around the fields searching for invertebrates or gorging on discarded fruit in orchards and or on cotoneaster berries in gardens. Chaucer referred to them, appropriately, as “the frosty feldefares”. The name derives from “field farer” as in “wayfarer” and the flocks do indeed roam the countryside visiting field after field.

The two foreign species are easy to tell apart from the residents. The little redwing is the same size as the song thrush but has a red patch on each flank and a white stripe through the eye. The fieldfarer, the size of a mistle thrush, has a grey head and rump. Its tail is almost black. The “chuk-chuk” flight-call is a distinctive winter sound.

Winter is a good time to learn to tell our resident thrushes apart; there is less cover in fields and hedgerows and numbers are swelled by visitors from abroad, particularly Scandinavia. Identifying song and mistle thrushes is easy. There is a marked difference in size between the two. The mistle thrush is larger and paler underneath but the most obvious distinguishing feature is the colour of the underside of the wing. A song thrush’s wings flash brown when it flies whereas a mistle thrush shows white flashes.

British blackbirds come to Ireland for the winter. Ringers catch some particularly large and heavy ones, which may be from further afield. Unlike the other thrushes, however, we don’t have further arrivals during the winter; blackbirds prefer to sit out a cold spell, rather than move in response to it. This is probably a good strategy because the species is thriving everywhere. The world’s most successful thrush lives quite happily even in built-up areas. Male and female thrushes generally have similar plumages but the blackbird is an exception. In Irish, the bird even has two names; “lundubh” for the male and “céirseach” for the female. Mature males have bright yellow bills matched by a yellow ring around the eye. The females are brown and have brown bills.

By the time most of the migrants leave in the spring, another thrush will have arrived. The ring ouzel, the mountain blackbird, is one of our earliest summer visitors. Having spent the winter around the Mediterranean, it moves to boulder-strewn hillsides in Northern countries to breed. Its name refers to the conspicuous white neck collar which the bird wears. “Ouzel” is an old name for the blackbird. Following the census of birds carried out by BirdWatch Ireland between 1988 and 1991, the number of ring ouzels in the county was estimated at between 180 and 360 nesting pairs. There had been a marked decline since the census of 1968 to 1972; the bird was absent from many of its previous haunts. In all probability, numbers are still falling; the forthcoming Atlas project will, hopefully, clarify the situation. Although the ouzel is in trouble here, it seems to be holding its own in Scandinavia and Finland.