Airedale, West Yorkshire Far from being robust birds, these visitors from Scandinavia can suffer terribly when the temperature drops

The little grebes have changed into their smart off-season outfits – smoky-brown, with a dark cap worn low on the brow – and moved upriver, westward, to winter with us. The quickening of the current has brought a dipper down from the river’s higher reaches. In a hawthorn that overhangs the water, redwings gorge on the dull red fruit.

These aren’t the first redwings I’ve seen this season: since the turn of October they’ve been skipping through high overhead in threes and fours and fives, calling seep, seep. The warden, hunkered in the adjoining meadow on autumn “vismigging” (visible migrant) duty, pointed out to me their distinctively irregular wingbeats.

But these are the first I’ve seen in close-up: close enough to see the clotted-cream eyestripe and vermilion underwing of these dapper little thrushes. Newly arrived from Scandinavia or north-eastern Europe, they’ll gulp down haws and other autumn fruits until the trees are bare. Then they’ll repair in flocks to the fields.

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Because they only come to us in winter, it’s easy to think that, for all their delicacy (the redwing is the smallest thrush commonly seen in the UK), these are robust birds, nordically indifferent to frost and snow. But in fact redwings can suffer terribly when the temperature drops.

Writers of the early 20th century were familiar with the bird’s fearful vulnerability to cold. “A redwing starved to death used to be no unfrequent sight in the course of a winter’s ramble,” wrote CA Johns, while John Henry Salter remembered, in the spring, finding “the dried remains of redwings in the crevices into which they crept for shelter when the frost was cruel”.

Better, perhaps, to think of the redwing as it is known in the far northern beechwood where it is born and breeds. The Newcastle naturalist William Chapman Hewitson visited Norway in 1833, and saw the bird in its full breeding-season splendour, “perched upon the summit of the highest trees, pouring forth its delightfully wild note”.

Here, now, the redwings are quiet, too busy eating to sing, and for the moment the only wild note comes from an irate wren, tutting and sneezing deep in the green-grey brambles.

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