The hundred plus rowan trees planted five years ago dripped berries from late summer, maybe aware of their role in feeding the many birds and mammals spread across the ten acres in late autumn into winter. Their drooping branches were released from their weight by migrant birds, fieldfare, blackbirds and home grown mistle and song thrushes, in the November before the harsh December days of minus 2C to minus 8C at night.
Mistle thrushes on the battlements
Yet some of the few ‘Joseph Rock’ rowans held their berries until this bitter cold period, offering morsels, glittering orange jewels in the morning sun as it broke through the skyline. Tempting for all those birds flying, searching, and hungry. The food patrols were foraging across the fields and hedge lines with vigour once the sun’s minimal warmth hit the bushes and trees. So, it was time for two mistle thrushes to take up sentry duties on these rowans, with clear defence strategies for ‘their’ berries.
For around five hours per day of best sunlight or light intensity they watched and defended from these rowan trees or from a nearby apple tree. Every 30–60 minutes there was a frenetic guzzling of eight to ten berries from ‘their’ trees, snatched with their precision beaks and gulped down quickly. A pause for digestion followed, but they remained on duty in case another bird tried to do likewise with ‘their’ berries.
The winter migrant blackbirds from Scandinavia tried a low-flying approach to this rowan’s lower branches, coming from all sides of a compass. They failed, rapidly sent packing, with significant determination, by the mistle thrushes. The range of tits – coal, blue, great and marsh – were equally challenging in pursuit of even a single berry. Intelligent as they are, they soon learnt to access these trees before daybreak or after 3pm as the sun disappeared west, the thrushes having left their sentry posts by then.
The ’berry budget’
Maybe the icy cold weather was driving this interesting activity of the thrushes, challenging them with the lack of food options. Their favourite food source, snails, was now hidden behind the stone cobbles frozen into place and the rock-hard iced leaf litter of the hedgerows. The rowan berries became an obsession that ruled the thrushes for days into January, taking some each day, guarding the rest for tomorrow. They have carefully eked them out, you might call it ‘berry budget’ control, taking some from different bunches, but not all of them. They’ve lasted four weeks, so far, and no doubt will a little longer.
No such restraint for the blackbirds and fieldfares. They retreated to the cotoneaster bushes dripping red with berries on the northside of the fields, gleefully stripping the bushes within days, and dropping many berries to the ground for wren, robin, chaffinches… sharing their bush food!
The more bushes with berries, the more the noisy sorties occur. Wilding for winter berry food was a key focus for us, with a diverse planting mix from bird cherry to cotoneaster, whitebeam and rowan to cornus and viburnum lantana. All the birds share the berries, sometimes even the bullfinches visit for their share. The thrushes take all their orange berries are on their ‘Joseph Rock’ tree.
The owl and the hawk
The barn owl prowls the slopes over the areas where the grass cut for hay in summer is now left long, as no animals graze these days. It’s a cold, dry sunrise and the owl quarters east and west over the hedges and grassy areas, halting in an ‘acer campestre’ field maple, a heritage tree of unknown years. It too is wary as the kestrel is perched on its viewpoint: the dead holly tree copse left uncut for nature. The kestrel follows with interest the owl’s movements. It may offer the possibility of food as it pounces on a field vole hidden in grass clumps.
In the summer weeks when the kestrel family in an old oak was in need of food, there were screeching battles between kestrel and barn owl. The kestrel would wait in the top of the hawthorn in the hour before twilight or after dawn to attack the owl and force it drop its catch. Nature has canny adaptations and the owl found ways to keep its hunted meal. Catching its prey, it remained on the ground and stretched out its wings to protect the sharp-eyed kestrel from seeing its catch. The owl quickly gobbled, with repeated head turning to check for any low-flying snatching passes. Another of many field voles nourishes the owl.
It’s an important adaptation as, in the four years since barn owls settled in, two have been found dead, one malnourished and thin, just 240g, and another injured head and beak. Still the two barns provide shelter and nest sites and important cover on pheasant shoot days, when the world sounds like eastern European battle fields and people stay safe in their cottages and hide their frightened dogs in the quietest corner.
Herons and hedges
As freezing conditions lift, the herons visit the scrapes and pond we put into the fields for nature diversity and a frog catches my attention as it makes for the pond! It is 22 December and 12C warmer; the frogs are on the move and herons somehow know where a great meal could be found!
The ever-widening hedge line offers much cosy shelter deep within from wind, rain, snow and ice flakes. The brambles expanded in all directions, through and over the old holly, hazel and now added field maple, guelder rose, crab apples, damson and cotoneaster francetti. The sound in an adjacent field is of the tractor machines, cutting and stripping the berries and leaf and branch cover from hedges, a bleak sound to hear in deep mid-winter, leaving a silent, cold, inactive-seeming dead structure.
But the uncut hedges are an orchestra of bird sound, a winter sunrise chorus and place of constant activity, flying, scuttling, pecking, pulling, gulping, scratting in a wind-safe, predator-protected world with food and company…. nature regains, recovers, renews when there is plenty for it and for mankind.
