Mid January belongs to the thrushes. The light has started tilting back in life's favour and we have had a couple of warmer days. Song thrushes have started singing in the last day or two. It started with a distant piping coming from up the valley, and now other resident males are starting to crank their emphatic, repetitive notes, pushing them up through the murk, the mist, the sideways rain and the wind like crocus shoots through loosening soil. They sound like they're reaching, or re-asserting, or building something. It's a glorious sound.
From the end of summer, our song thrushes seemed to disappear. Late summer moult is a quiet time for songbirds, and we expect them to lay low. But our song thrushes just seemed to vanish. I didn't see one from August to the end of October. They were here alright, but out of sight - tucked away feeding, keeping safe in the base of the blackthorn thickets. Now they're scooting out from hedges and patches of bramble as before, issuing that chuckling, nutty, hazel-brown alarm call. They know something's up. I don't know what they call it, this widening of the light, but we call it - recklessly, prematurely - spring.
Wafts of fieldfares and redwings are still combing the hedgerows, and the mistle thrushes started singing a week or more ago, casting those wild notes on the air from the highest trees in the valley. Eight or nine blackbirds, some of them surely winter visitors from perhaps as far away as the Baltic, have regularly been feeding together in the far field. There have been blackbirds everywhere this winter. When the winter visitors are starting to leave, and some time around late February or March the resident males unfurl their beautiful fluid song: that will be a moment to celebrate.
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