There are always a few signs of spring before Christmas. Primroses are out in Devon, the bright green leaves of cow parsley are coming up on roadside verges, and song thrushes are singing again. So far I have heard one singing a jangly, broken song in the dawn, and one in full voice, with the classic ringing triple notes, as the sun was going down.
Not all song thrushes sing at this time of year. Some have migrated, others are simply quietly feeding under bushes, unstirred by spring feelings. But almost everywhere in Britain a few of them have now come back to their territories and are laying preliminary claims to ownership with their songs. It will help them to establish themselves in the spring. Most of them will fall silent again if it turns very cold and will be heard no more until the end of January, although some will sing on intermittently throughout the winter.
There is a moving poem by Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush, about hearing a thrush singing one evening “when Frost was spectre-gray”. He does not say if it was a song thrush or a mistle thrush, but describes the song as like “a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited”. Mistle thrushes also sing in winter, but their brief trumpet-blasts do not sound quite like that. I think it was a song thrush.
They have a repertoire of more than a hundred phrases to draw on when they sing. This variety in their song is noted by Geraldine Taylor, an observant counsellor for students at the University of Bristol, in a little book about her relationship with local birds, The Coffee Thrush (Eye On Books, £5). “Some choose bubbling phrases, some chuckle, others converse with me more earnestly,” she writes in winsome style.
There is also an extraordinary contrast beween their behaviour when feeding and when singing. They are normally shy birds, yet when they sing they will sit fearlessly on the topmost bough of a bare tree. I suppose they reckon that from there they can see a sparrowhawk coming just as easily as it can see them.