Day of the thrushes as sun shines

IT is difficult for the self-employed to stay indoors these days when the sky is blue and the world outside bathed in sunlight, and there is – even! – warmth in sheltered corners so that one could close one’s eyes and think one is on the Mediterranean.

Thank goodness I am not. It has been raining buckets down there; for weeks on end we have had the best weather in Europe, I believe.

One day last week, walking above the sea at the Seven Heads in west Cork, I saw together, in a single, small field, all but one of the six species of thrushes that spend all or part of the year in Ireland. The field was very green, the sea below it very blue and the thrushes were very bright in the warm, winter sun.

The missing species was the ring ouzel, a slim and lovely bird, very much like our resident black thrush – which we call the blackbird – but with a striking, white bib. I haven’t seen a ring ouzel since I was a boy, when I saw them relatively regularly, perched on stone walls in bare landscapes, in upland Mayo and in Donegal. I hope their eggs weren’t among those my friends and I collected as a hobby which, of course, was criminal, but was regarded as a healthy pastime then. When Clive Hutchinson, doyen of Irish birders, wrote his book, Where to Watch Birds in Ireland in the mid. 1990s, the only mention of ouzels was of a few pairs nesting on the rocky slopes above Glendalough and Glenmalure, in Wicklow, and in Glenveagh National Park in Donegal. Summer migrants from the mountains of mainland Europe, I wonder if they come there still.

Our native song thrush is familiar to all and, if we are lucky, like the blackbird, a garden resident. The flutings of a blackbird make a fine musical background to a summer evening, but they cannot be compared with the arias of a mature thrush in full voice. Few avian singers can compare. We do not have the nightingale in Ireland and the skylark, a bird of the meadows and rough country, is increasingly rare.

In winter, the migrant redwing may be mistaken for a song thrush, but is much browner and more robin-like in profile and, while the russet underwing feathers for which it is named may be difficult to see, the distinctive bright yellow stripe through and above the eye (the supercilium) stands out against the dark cheeks. Redwing are fast flyers, moving in flocks, and usually staying well away from humans. This, of course, was not the case in early January, when they arrived in hundreds of thousands from frozen Europe and, finding Britain and Ireland blanketed in snow, sought food anywhere they could get it, and died of starvation in the streets of Kanturk, Cahersiveen and other Irish towns.

The mistle thrush is like a large, pale, song thrush. Because of its size, it can be mistaken for a thrush that comes in winter, the fieldfare, but the fieldfare is by far the handsomest of the two, a beautiful bird with a slate grey head and rump, yellow breast, dark brown wings and pitch-black tail. A characteristic of the mistle thrush is that, when hunting, it stands very upright, listening for the movement of invertebrates in the grass. It is with us all year, and is one of the earliest breeders: now, in March, there will already be eggs in its big, untidy nest, high up in trees. It enjoys the romantic name of Stormcock for its habit of singing loudly from the topmost branches even on the wildest March days, perhaps serenading its mate sitting on the eggs, below.

Spring accelerates, now that it’s started. This day last week, a farmer rang me to say that wild crocuses carpeted a field the size of a tennis court. I went to look, and indeed they did. Hundreds of lilac and white crocuses with golden centres had sprung up in this sheltered paddock as they have for as long as its owner could remember. But this year, they were exceptional in their profusion. Hover flies worked their way over them like honey bees, and, walking home, I heard the sleepy drone of the bumblebee for the first time this year.