Our neighbours grow apples commercially and their five acres supply both the community in autumn and the thrushes during winter. Recently I fulfilled a long-held promise to erect a hide and watch the birds among the windfalls there. First I had to gather several barrowfuls of my own, which was itself a memorable exercise. While I raked the wasp-mined Bramleys my boots mulched down the flesh, sending up a sweet foetor and leaving geometrically patterned cakes of apple mud underfoot.
Once I’d tipped 100lb of fruit in a sunlit heap by the hide, I retired to steep the whole scene in silence, before returning next day.
The blackbirds found it first, although I could hear fieldfares all about. Befitting their relative physical proportions, the latter’s calls are coarser and larger. They have a jarring quality, an element of awkwardness, like twisted rubber, as if an indefinable force of effort went into the making.
They are wilder than blackbird sounds, too, without any hint of domestication, for fieldfares are a rough tribe from Europe’s boreal woodlands. It’s not uncommon to see two fight over fruit for minutes on end, each lunging alternately at the other, as if strings controlled the rise and fall of their squabble.
The flock slowly summoned courage to feed as one, although sudden, hard-fletched panic was a common interruption. I came to appreciate how the chakking notes are a permanent anxiety-filled force-field about fieldfares that governs their social lives and oversees their security.
They maintain it with good reason: one morning I came back to find a sparrowhawk kill, a nest of beautiful feathers around the death spot.
But desire trumped fear, and down they plumped, mixing thick impasto ochres and burnt chocolate and smoky blue-greys into the lime green and orange of rotting fruit. Yet this was not art but life, and when all settled to feed, gulping simultaneously, heads and throats quivering as they snaked down apple pulp, the whole scene seemed to pullulate like a hill of maggots.
It was an object lesson in survival, in the exigencies of thrush hunger and the imperishable abundance of an English winter.
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