It was a damp, foggy start to the day. Cloud wrapped around us as we started walking along the concrete track. The morning chill fingered its way down the inside of my scarf. Pylons had their heads in the clouds. The wooden humpback bridge over the mud-brown River Thames was slippery and we slowed our pace to cautious small steps, hanging onto the cold side-rails. Through a heavily counterbalanced gate, we walked into a rough, rush-spiked field. It was wet underfoot, but easily traversed. Our decision to wear walking boots instead of sliding around with cold feet in thin-soled wellies had paid off.
A group of fieldfares flew overhead, crackling snapping calls dropping through the humid air. It wasn’t exactly a flock. The birds didn’t stay in tight formation or form morphing shoals. They flew fast and direct, blurring wing beats and short glides, settling briefly in a treetop then scattering again in different directions. No time to get a good look. They looked grey, like everything else in that dank light. Not much chance of making out the fieldfares’ bold blocks of browns and greys, nor the blushing sides or bright eye-stripes of the redwings.
Everywhere we went, chattering birds were raiding the winter stocks of berries. Hawthorn trees were full of shadowy shapes, dark against dark, shadows in thickets, an urgency of chattering and squeaking. Impossible to count, flocks formed and dispersed with the efficiency of well-prepared looters.
These nervy, rampaging flocks had arrived in the autumn. On a cool October morning, I’d heard nails-on-blackboard squeals and looked up to see my first small group of redwings in loose, bouncing flight over my local shopping centre. They would have felt the temperature rise as they flew through the dark nights from Russia and Scandinavia and arrived on the east coast of Britain hungry for nutritious berries.
The gossip of winter thrushes accompanied us for the rest of our walk. A snipe wheezed as it catapulted out of a wet ditch. It was humus and wintered reeds in flight.
Mudwriter 