Thomas Bewick called them “wind thrushes”. The 18th-century engraver grew up not far from here, in the village of Eltringham. He felt “an extreme pleasure in seeing … the redwings make their appearance” each autumn. They’re still here on the brink of spring, two dozen or so, assembled in a bare treetop at Beamish, near Stanley, all of them pointing west, facing down the wind.
Beamish is a living museum of northern life. Scenes and settings from 70, 80, 100-odd years ago are immaculately reconstructed. Trams and old diesel buses trundle you around. Here, in the rebuilt 1900s pit village, there are miners’ cottages, a Wesleyan chapel, a band hall, a school. And jackdaws – hundreds of jackdaws.
“Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw, / A thousand years ago even as now, / Black rooks with white gulls following the plough” – Edward Thomas’s poetry comes to mind as we stand beneath the tumult of little crows (jack, they say, their own name, over and over). Every stone village ought to have a noisy traffic of jackdaws over its slate roofs.
The great Durham bird man George Temperley wrote in the early 1950s of the changes wrought by industry in this part of the county. “Towns and villages have sprung up one after another, as new coal-pits have been opened, and desolation has spread around them,” he wrote.
But Temperley understood that wildlife adapts, that birds are able to see opportunity as well as threat in flooded pit-creeps, derelict brickfields, slagheaps, sand quarries. “Changes have always gone on and will continue to do so,” he wrote, “but those who, in the past, have ventured to prophesy the effect of those changes on the bird life have usually been proved to have been wrong.”
The jackdaws go tumbling up away over the winding gear of the drift mine. Anyone could see what coal was doing to the landscapes in these parts – the scars, the spoil, the grey carbon barrens. What coal was doing to us all, everywhere, was less obvious. Scars at least can heal.
• Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
• Richard Smyth’s new book, The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell, is out on 30 March
