I like birds and being able to have a stab at identifying them, but I’m no ornithologist, so I tend to just break them down into small, medium or large and then look in a book to identify. This has stood me in good stead, I can confidently differentiate between a sparrow and a pheasat. So here’s a look at some of our smallest garden birds.
The Wren
Wrens are surprisingly loud for their diminutive size, and have a larger than life presence in folklore and legend.
In a typical contrary set of myths and legends wrens are both revered as a ‘most sacred bird’ with taboos about killing or disturbing their nests, whilst at the same time being blamed for the death of St Stephen by singing out and revealing his hiding place. On St Stephens day (AKA ‘Wrenning Day”) there are accounts of customs in which wrens were stoned to death and carried in procession from house to house. How exactly you stone to death a wren as it flits about in a hedgerow is hard to fathom, and why the poor wretch should be blamed for St Stephen being a clumsy oaf and disturbing the local wildlife in a frankly pretty dismal attempt at martyrdom is a bit of a stretch. But there we go, logic never got in the way of a mystical tale did it?
The druids, or rather the stories written about druids long after they had ceased to be a thing, hold the wren as being a symbol of wisdom and cunning. In one tale a wren became the highest flying bird after cadging a lift on the back of an eagle, auguries could be drawn from it’s songs and just seeing one blessed you with inner knowledge. An example of a wren based omen runs thus; ‘Dick took a wren’s nest from his cottage side. And ere a twelvemonth past his mother dy’d!’ The exclamation mark is the poets own, although poet is a misnomer over this piece of doggerel, I’m sure Dick must have done many things that could amount for his mothers death over the course of a year, but no, it was because he tossed a nest, silly Dick. Besides, why was the supernatural retribution delivered 12 months later to the wrong person? His poor mum may just have carked it from being ancient, but village life demands petty drama so the whispers started.
Back here in the real world wrens do indeed seem to be a bit different, their staccato movements define a life lived in the fast lane, camouflaged to blend in when pecking about for food in the undergrowth or flitting like a bullet from one place to another. We have them nesting in the ivy that encumbers the fence under the shade of a large spruce, I suspect the pair that are here this year are new as I found one lying dead on the lawn on the coldest day back in February when the temperature hit -10 overnight. I realised just how slight these birds are as I held its cold little body in my hand, hard to equate the powerful singing voice with this little scrap of feather and bone.
When it comes to mating season the males will build several nests and invite the female to pick the best. The nests are tiny delicate things, lined with scraps of feather and fur to make them warm, it’s hard to imagine that they are widespread acroos the country from gardens to bleak moorland.
Yet the tough little wren is perfectly built for a life lived in nooks and crannies, whether they are in your garden or on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, wrens will be there. An estimate puts their population at eight million breeding pairs in the UK, making them one of the most common species, yet lots of people haven’t seen them. This elusiveness is probably where that druidic tale of inner knowledge comes from, yet despite seeing them regularly around the garden my inner knowledge is still pretty sparse.
