The Fieldfare and the Apple Tree

I part the blinds and look out the window to greet him, but he is gone. The branches are silent, the lichen still as stone. Deep-green ivy suckers its tiny feet up the trunk and the camellia neighbours swell their buds without a care. He is gone and, in a shattering moment, winter grasps me. A bodily tug inward to the depths of life, when all is stripped away and the truth of this world is laid bare.

Cast back in my memory to a month or so back. A late autumnal day, one of those porcelain-fine, golden days. There was a stirring outside, and I looked to see a flock of birds fill the yew tree with their clatter and swinging beaks, landing on smart red berries, swallowing them whole, then edging to the next. My yellowing 1970s RSPB bird guide confirmed my identification. Fieldfares. They were happy there for an hour or so, feasting their way through the flailing branches then, as one, they swept away.

But, each day after that, when I went outside the apple tree would emit a startled rasp and leaves would shake as a dark shadow tried to escape my gaze. On the third day, I followed the shape for long enough to see it was a fieldfare. A thrush-like bird of calendars that sings winter. With festive shots of white beneath its belly and a red tinge to its collar, it is a bird of stature and presence and seasonal greetings. This one was also frightened, hopping along a soughing branch to place himself at its furthest tip from me. I retreated, whispering some quiet reassurance as I might to a child, and left him be.

For weeks, he remained in the apple tree. Decaying apples formed a cider-soaked rug beneath his new home, ripe crimson and blushing green nestling together like baubles packed away in their festive box. He collected fragments of apple and ate them from the protection of the window cill, which soon became black and sticky with discarded pulp.

His solitude knocked on my own and I felt the loss of his fellows with a keen pain. His tribe had long since departed to other gardens, to other hawthorn trees on the distant moor. It became clear over the weeks that the flock who swept our yew tree clean of its fruit one cool afternoon in November had abandoned one of its own. The birds were not coming back.

The shock of his isolation has weighed heavy on me these past weeks. Looking at him, hunched alone on a wizened apple branch, I wonder how it happened. Was he distracted by a stubborn berry, looking away for a brief moment whilst they took flight and cast north over the church? Did he look up from wiping moist remnants clinging to his beak to find an empty space where his fellows once stood, merry and messy? Does he feel their loss deep beneath his feathers? And do they miss his rasping cry from where they are now, still in their clutch of cordiality? Do they cock their heads and wonder at the space where he should be?

My husband brings me tea and I tell him I am writing about our fieldfare. He smiles, but then I tell him he’s gone. No! He can’t be! He walks into the bedroom and says, no there he is, still there, on the branch, all puffed up.

A small crease in my universe folds back into place. Sometimes our tribe is small, momentary, and close. Sometimes we have each other and sometimes we are alone. Fieldfare is still with us, his home is ours for now, and he breathes a white puff of comfort into our lives, safe and cherished. I don’t know where his flock have gone, and I hope with all my might that they will remember this place and call back to collect him before they cast off for distant shores. For now, winter is a time for solitude, his and ours. A time to sit with the mystery of it all, to wait it out and to watch for the return of dark shapes in the sky.