The sky is suddenly filled with redwings. I had forgotten their thin, reedy screed until the rowans were filled with it. Flights of song thrushes have been tantalizing me for days, chittering and clicking as they fly against hot blue skies. I hope they are fieldfares every time, then spot dotted breasts and that familiar, fractionally unhinged facial expression. Now that the redwings are here, the fieldfares won’t be far away. The sparrowhawks are audibly slavering.
These new migrants often move after dark. The night is addled with their dreams, and the dry thorn scrub clatters as they toss and turn. Flights of fifty and more have been passing over the house all morning, while a hundred pink footed geese flew in a stretchy skein down to the coast at the edge of hearing, jangling the stillness and looking strange against the last schools of juvenile swallows.
