We're in the redwing and rot half of the year - part 1

Rhythm, redwings, rot, and some sensual, seasonal shit.

This has been split into two parts, because it ended up getting way too long. It would appear that I am pathologically incapable of brevity.

How many seasons does your year have? Two, four, six, seven, seventy two?

How you view the seasons will be influenced by your country, your culture, and what you pay attention to. Vegetable growers, birders, stargazers, wild swimmers, TV-lovers, arthritics, sports-fans, and people of different religions (think I’ve covered all the categories of human there, right?) will probably all feel the rhythm of the year in slightly different ways.

Where do the seasons arrive for you? Mine get into my (wonky) nostrils first, because it is my nose that’s paying the most attention to the world. If I divide the year up by smells I reckon I’d have about 20 seasons. We’re just coming out of the season of chimney smoke, jizzy-smelling ivy flowers, and mealy-scented mushrooms, before that it was metallic blackberry juice, woodsmoke, and fruity-smelling mushroom season. Those are micro-seasons that exist under the blanket of a larger chunk of time that I think of as the season of rot and smoke, a time when gods of the sky and soil are being fed.

Above

Rhythm doesn’t exist anywhere else in my body. I can’t drum or even clap in time, my menstrual cycle is fucked, and I’m a clumsy dancer, but, when it comes to the year, I am polyrhythmic. In the same year that I’m sniffing all the micro-seasons, my ears (small, elfin) have divided the year into just two beats; lone cuckoo calling out his name, and then the seeips of flocks of redwings.

In April of this year I wrote about cuckoo celebrations and songs, including the song Sumer is icumen in. It’s summer, not spring that the song says is coming in, because in England (at least according to Bede) our ancestors once saw the year as holding just two parts; winter and summer. From what I’ve read (historians, please correct me if I’m wrong¹) it seems that summer started around April the 14th (cuckoo day in Sussex) and winter started with the October full moon; Winterfylleth.

Beside cuckoo and redwing seasons, and early Germanic people’s summer and winter, there are other ways of cleaving the year in two along roughly the same lines. There’s robin-sings-a-cheery-song season, and robin-sings-a-more-melancholy-tune time², there’s also the bit of year that starts on my birthday (which falls around Newroz and the vernal equinox) and the other with my mum’s birthday (around the autumnal equinox, and harvest festivals); Sarah season, and Anna season.

If you view the year as a circle (a wheel, a clock, a cycle, whatever) then the vernal equinox is directly across from the autumnal one, and the redwing is across from the cuckoo. Next month we’ll have the longest night of the year (in the northern hemisphere), and from the shore of that time you can see across to the shortest night and longest day. I love celebrating the solstices and the equinoxes when I can, and think ritual and marking days is important, but I also know that the old year is constantly dying, and the new year is constantly being born at the same time. The year is in a constant state of flux. Me, too.

The cuckoos are welcomed as a herald of spring; a sign that it’s the beginning of upward and outward growth, of warmer weather, and longer, lighter days. The redwings, harbingers of the season of turning inward, of decay and darkening days, are welcomed too. They don’t have the same long history of being celebrated in this country³, but everyone I know who pays attention to the birds gets excited by the arrival of the redwings, as well as the cuckoos.

A rushing, rustling sound is heard in the English Channel on the dark still nights of winter, and is called the 'herring spear,' or ' herring piece,' by the fishermen of Dover and Folkestone. This is caused by the flight of those pretty little birds, the redwings, as they cross the Channel on their way to warmer regions. The fishermen listen to the sound with awe, yet regard it, on the whole, as an omen of good success with their nets. - The folk lore and provincial names of British birds by Charles Swainson.

Paying attention to flora, fauna, and fungi throughout the year brings joy without a doubt, but it can bring grief too. Grief when summer comes and brings stillness where there should be the flapping of tiny little wings, and silence where there should be song.

I’m guilty of sometimes talking about the natural world as though it is something separate from us, and it’s not true. I try to stop if I catch myself doing it, but still sometimes I talk about it as though we as humans are one thing, and the birds and bees and toadstools and trees are another thing. Doing so can lead to anthropocentrism in one direction, and misanthropy (who hasn’t heard someone talk about how much they love animals but hate humans?) in another, and neither are healthy for us, or the big web of life that we are a part of.

So if we’re paying attention to the birds, who’s to say they’re not paying attention to us? Bird, watching. And if the birds are paying attention to us, maybe they’re grieving too.

I can’t think of migrating birds⁴ without thinking of the movement of humans across the globe. I love the image of fishermen listening in awe as hundreds or maybe thousands of redwings pass over them, grateful for the favourable omen for their haul. But when I read that quote I also think about the other boats in the water, and the people in them that might be watching and listening to the redwings too.

2024 has been the deadliest year for migrant boats crossing the English channel. 

The majority of people crossing the Channel in small boats are fleeing war-torn or oppressive countries where no safe and formal routes exist for making an asylum claim in the UK. - Refugee council.

The above quote might be stating something that is pretty obvious to you, most people don’t risk their lives unless they feel that there is no alternative, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated.

I reckon I spend a decent amount of time touching grass (very literally mostly), but I still spend too much time on social media. For the most part I’ve gamed my online experience to be one that is educational and enjoyable; I see when someone local has spotted ring ouzels or returning redwings, I learn about different ways to identify Waxcaps and Entoloma from people far more knowledgeable than me, but occasionally the vile seeps through too and I see something that feels like a punch to the gut instead of a dopamine hit, like somebody who lives in the next town along joking about people drowning in the channel.

What level of othering do you have to do in your head to get to that place? I can’t imagine there’s a way you can get that far away from compassion from others without being the same distance away from compassion for yourself.

The redwings (Turdus iliacus) migrate here from Northern and Eastern Europe, usually arriving around the beginning of October and leaving around March or April, just before the cuckoos appear. You may see them flocking together with fieldfare (another beautiful migratory bird), other thrushes, and starlings. They spend their time here in hedgerows, farmland, and woodland, eating bugs and berries.

One of the berries that redwings (and fieldfares, and other thrushes) eat is the haw, the fruit of the hawthorn tree. This is a berry I share their appreciation of, one I make a kind of ketchup with when they’re having a good year (which they are not this year⁵).

Hawthorn trees have long been associated with magic, fairies, fertility, and sexuality, and involved in the celebrations for May day/Beltane (the midpoint between the spring equinox and summer solstice). Their flowers and berries are used in herbal medicine for the physical and figurative heart, and for treating grief, although I believe they work best as a grief medicine if you are able to go out and forage them yourself.

I’m mindful when I pick the berries that I need to leave some for other people who want to pick them, leave some to adorn the tree and be admired, and leave lots for the thrushes that feast on them. Birds help disperse the seeds of the fruit they eat, and thus create more trees⁶, some seeds even become more viable as a result⁷. There’s some added potency to the grief medicine then; berries foraged from a tree borne from a berry ingested and passed through the digestive tract of a thrush.

I ask the tree permission before picking the haws, and say thank you when I’ve harvested my lot. Thank you tree, and thank you person that planted you, or bird that shat you out.

On April the 12th this year I listened to the first cuckoo of the year while walking across Leith hill, and on the 5th of October, while stood in roughly the same spot, I listened to a flock of redwings returning. Both birds calls reminded me that I don’t deserve my safety any more or any less than anyone else, it was nothing that I did to be afforded the luxury to hear the redwings while on firm ground. There’s also no guarantee of that firm ground in the future.

Over the last year I’ve been trying really hard to learn how to do some things that have felt important to my survival. Two of those things; being in the here and now, and learning how to be still. Where I’m at with it now is that both seem like a lie, like an impossibility. The here is constantly shifting under our feet, and the now contains the tree it once was and the tree it will become and the berry in the belly of the bird right now, all at once. The bones of my body might be still for a moment, but the smells are moving through my nose, and the bird calls are moving through my ears, and the heart is beating like a woodpecker drumming, and all the seasons are passing through me.

1. Usually I could spend hours researching something like this in old books on Internet Archive, but it was still down when I wrote this.

2. Robins are a good example of why I don’t think animals are any better (or worse) than us. They are gorgeous, and friendly to humans, and sing lovely songs, and sometimes kill each other over territory. I also think it is bonkers that a bird book I once read referred to them as hypocrites.

3. Cuckoo ale, cuckoo fairs, cuckoo songs, etc.

4. There are a million and one good reasons to check out

Lev Parikian

’s excellent Substack, one of them is this radar clip of migrating birds he recently shared.

5. A bad year for berries also means a bad year for Waxwings.

6. Blackcaps with mistletoe, and thrushes with hawthorn, rose and rowan, but also the food they store away makes more trees- read

Mark Diacono

’s piece on Jays planting acorns (it’s also about Angel delight, and Chilean guava cake, and the tricksy magic of blue in feathers).

7. See here - https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/artuicle/216/19/v/11689/BIRDS-DIGESTION-CLEANSES-PASSING-SEEDS