Fieldfare

12 June 2014 Stockholm, Sweden. We’ve been planning this trip to Sweden for months and the Princeton Birds of Europe field guide has been a key part of my pre search/research. I’m still not really sure what to expect from the greater part of Sweden since it appears to be bypassed by many of the birds of Europe; still my first couple of days have been rewarding. I grew up in England, and while we’re here in Stockholm, I’m seeing many of my familiar garden birds: Magpies, Blackbirds, Chaffinches, Jays and both Great and Blue Tits. I’ve added a few new-to-me birds too: Baltic Gull (actually a subspecies of the Lesser Great Black-backed Gull), Hooded Crow and Fieldfares, a species which as a child I always longed to see.
Fieldfares are a large thrush closely related to (in the same genus) as the American Robin, European Blackbird and Clay-coloured Thrush of Central America. They are predominantly birds of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia but my childhood field guides (such as they were) tantalizingly suggested that I might sometimes see one in England during the winter; I never did. But now, fifty years later, they’re everywhere around me, commoner that any other species and I’m pleased to be able to fill the gap in my mental ‘seen that’ files and deservingly they’ve been my Bird of the Day for a couple of days.
Jays are fairly common too and I’ve seen first hand evidence of why they are loathed by many sentimentalists. Twice I have watched a Jay seize, kill and partially dismember fledgeling Blue Tits as food for its own ravenous young. Blue Tits raise large broods, eight is not unusual, and clearly many are doomed to perish at an early age; after all it only takes one offspring to survive over the breeding life of a single adult to keep the population steady.