OPPOSITE my house, in Regent’s Park in London, a song thrush sings for half the night. I think he takes a break, but I have heard him around two o’clock and around four o’clock when I have happened to wake. A robin is often singing with him. For both of them, the lamplight is bright enough for them to regard it as daytime when it comes to singing, even if it is too dark for feeding.
In the silence of the night, the thrush’s song rings out crystal-clear as I lie awake listening to it. It has grown richer since I first heard it after Christmas, with wonderful repeated triple notes, and long sequences of pure, flute-like whistles. The energy he expends must be colossal for a bird.
David Snow, a renowned ornithologist who lives in Buckinghamshire, wrote an article a year or two ago in British Birds magazine about the song thrushes he had recorded singing over a period of ten winters in his village. He brought out very clearly some of the things that most birdwatchers have at least vaguely known about their song. There is almost always a little song from some of them in November, then a somewhat mysterious lull in December, then a dramatic peak in January, with a slight falling-off at the end of that month, and then full song, with still more birds joining in as spring advances, until late July.
But there are quite noticeable variations from year to year, which Dr Snow tried to correlate with the weather. In general, it seemed that in warm, wet weather there was more song, presumably because it would have been easy then to find worms and snails, and so the birds would have had more time for singing. In very cold weather, there was less or no song, no doubt because then they were too busy looking for food. But in some winters, the pattern of song failed to correlate with the weather in this way, and those episodes remain a puzzle.
In my own experience, the December break is not at all necessarily linked to cold weather. Readers may have made — or might like to make — their own observations.
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All these singers are, of course, singing in order to claim and defend a territory that they will later nest in. Most blackbirds and chaffinches will not be doing that until February. We are lucky that song thrushes start so early and give us this glorious January song. We are lucky, too, that song thrush numbers have risen again, at least in parks and gardens — something that Dr Snow noticed in 2001, the last year of his study.
derwent.may@thetimes.co.uk
WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR
Birders Listen out for the distinctive three-note song of the song thrush
Twitchers Black-throated thrush, Townhill, Swansea, South Wales; Hume’s yellow-browed warbler, Marden, Witley Bay, Co Durham; lesser scaup, Caerlaverock WWT, Dumfries & Galloway.
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Details from Birdline, 09068 700222 (60p a min) www.birdingworld.co.uk , www.rspb.org.uk