The fieldfares (Turdus pilaris) descended on the hawthorn like garrulous gatecrashers at a genteel cocktail party, scaring away two blackbirds. About 30 eventually settled, cackling to each other as they began to strip haws from the twigs. These assertive winter visitors from Scandinavia and Russia are wary, flighty birds. I have rarely been able to watch their feeding technique from close quarters, but today the nearest was barely 10 feet away.
First, the intense gaze focused on a hawthorn berry. Then a lunge, a tug and a twist to wrench the prize from its stalk, a brief pause with the haw in its beak, and finally a deft toss of the head to send it down the gullet. Seven fruits in less than a minute. At this rate the local berry crop, heavy this year, would be exhausted well before Christmas.
But not all red fruits seem equally attractive. Just across the lane the hedge was laden with the autumn offering of guelder rose (Viburnum opulus), frequently planted for its bunches of scarlet berries, so shiny that they appear to be permanently wet. Their watery pulp renders them translucent, so they seemed to glow in slanting rays of this afternoon’s sunshine: impossible to overlook, but the fieldfares weren’t interested. Why do they ignore them?
When I posed that question on Twitter recently I had a reply from an ornithologist who said: ‘Smell them, I dare you!” I did, squashing a few fruits between finger and thumb. I can do no better than repeat his description of their smell: “piss and vomit”.
Fruits evolved to attract wild animal dispersers, long before human sensibilities arrived on the scene. There is no reason why birds’ olfactory preferences should match ours. But what is almost certain is that these guelder rose berries will still dangle here, untouched, brown and shrivelled, when spring arrives, as they do every year. Perhaps then, after that pungent pulp has dried, finches might find their seeds attractive.
The fieldfares’ attention was focused on the haws, until I made an incautious movement. Then they took flight, in a whoosh of wings, off to plunder another hawthorn bush.
