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When frost prevents access to food in the east, thrushes and blackbirds move westwards, just as the fieldfares and redwings do. That the fieldfares and redwings do so I can say with confidence, because, as they move in large flocks, there is no difficulty in tracing the direction in which they are going. They all went west when the severe weather began.
I laid down my book and listened. It was only the choking gurgle of a broken rain-pipe outside: then it was the ripple and swish of a meadow stream. To make out the voices of redwings and marsh-wrens in the rasping notes of the city sparrows behind the shutter required much more imagination. But I did it. I wanted to hear, and the splash of the water helped me.
In passing close to the withy-beds to return to the wood some branches have to be pushed aside and cause a slight noise. Immediately a crowd of birds rise out of the withies, where they have been roosting, and scatter into the night. They are redwings and thrushes; every withy-bed is full of them.
"The Redwings place their nests where it would seem very easy to reach them; but really the bushes are either surrounded by a little creek, hidden deep in the reeds, or the ground is so marshy that neither man nor beast can come near. That is the one reason why the males fly about so boldly, showing their glossy uniforms with the red and gold epaulets.
Above the mill-dam the water backs up to form a peaceful pond which mirrors the trees and the rushes and cat-tails above it and sleeps beneath the thicket of willows where the redwings flock in the evenings.
By noon business was virtually abandoned, for Clayton was getting ready to go to the wedding. Willowvale extended a welcome to the world. The wide front gates stood open, the big-eyed poplars beamed above the oleanders and the myrtle, while the thrushes and the redwings twittered and caroled their greetings from on high.
In half an hour the children were back again, all talking eagerly together. "The Redwings scolded us like everything!" said Dodo, "and Rap stepped right into an empty Meadow-lark's nest, without seeing it. A little way back there are lots of Bobolinks, too, singing and singing, but we couldn't find a single nest."
And before half the frost was over, all we had in the snowy ditches were hares so tame that we could pat them; partridges that came to hand, with a dry noise in their crops; heath-poults, making cups of snow; and a few poor hopping redwings, flipping in and out the hedge, having lost the power to fly.
From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this parallel of thirty degrees, window open, as well as the door, for no norther is on duty to-day, I see flocks of our familiar redwings, cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees.
Then there are birds which are common enough in England in the winter, but which mostly go away to Norwegian breeding-grounds, such as geese, ducks, woodcock, and snipe; while bramblings, fieldfares, and redwings are birds of the North, and never nest in Great Britain. And, on the other hand, some of our common resident birds migrate from Norway in the winter.
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