I had to cut my way out of the garden this morning. Last night’s snow, a dollop of wet confection, was too heavy for a liquidambar, full of leaf in glorious gold, red and purple. Branches snapped and folded into an impenetrable tangle: a drastic winter pruning and a reminder of how vulnerable trees are to sudden snowfall.
The flakes were more dove than goose down, but still falling seriously on Brogyntyn Park. It was transformed. The white pages that covered the grass were written on by joyfully anarchic footprints of early wanderers and their dogs, transgressing erased paths. Someone had made a snowman and snowdog. The lime avenue, arching and leafless, created a tunnel leading to a white glow like an out-of-body experience.
On some oaks, each ochre leaf carried a layer of snow, as if it were a white shadow of itself. In the middle of the park, the tall and stately small-leafed lime was crackling with invisible birds. An October video of a bird migration radar map showed the vogeltrek – an explosion of thousands of songbirds from Vlieland in the north-west Netherlands crossing the Wadden Sea. Birds were represented by coloured circles and numbers denoting individuals (red for medium to large birds, yellow for small birds) detected by radar flying below 200 metres on easterly winds towards the UK. Some of those red circles had returned to Brogyntyn and were taking cover in the lime tree’s central thatch of twigs. Schack, schack, crackled the fieldfares, recently arrived from their Netherlands stopover, their Nordic dialects cutting through snowy stillness.
A fieldfare, Turdus pilaris, is a thrush dressed up for a wedding. In their smart grey, chestnut and speckled plumage, bands of fieldfares fly in from Scandinavia and Russia in autumn. They are facultative migrants, driven by environmental conditions and the availability of food. Research from Norway shows that it’s the abundance of rowanberries rather than the weather that gets them moving. In Brogyntyn Park, the rowanberries, produced by young trees, have been snaffled up. The silhouettes of two fieldfares flew over the tree. Maybe they were scouting for rowans. The birds began a soft bubbling song like snow through winter trees.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
