Wren Writing

A late summer evening, when night was pushing the last indentations of heat from the air, the sinking dark was speared by an insistent call. This is my first “real” memory of the wren. I’m sure I knew of it before. I’d almost certainly recorded it in the lists I’ve kept for years of the wildlife – exciting and ordinary – spotted from the windows of the house. I’d have known it as a child. I’d have seen it hundreds of times. Still, that long evening was the first time I really looked.

It had to be a hard look. In those days we lived in a flat in a relatively new estate. We had a small patch of garden, and then on the far side of our communal fence was a shallow stream, then a small block of woodland, and then, less than a hundred metres away, the main railway line to London. It was a strange mixture of the bucolic and Elwood’s dosshouse room by the Chicago El in The Blues Brothers. It also meant that at that moment there was little artificial or natural light to spot a small brown bird. My ears had no such trouble.

Wrens are among the smallest birds in the British Isles, and unless you actually see them do it, it’s hard to believe that it’s them singing. They make a noise worthy of something blackbird sized. On this summer evening I couldn’t believe that the indistinct shape jerking around on the fence was the source of that penetrating “Chip… chip… chip… chip…” I scoured the willows that lived on the far bank of the stream, but my ears were insistent – it really was that little bird.

“Looks like a wren,” I reported. “Must be defending its territory.” I must have already known that they are intensely territorial. But it’s only recently that I’ve learned that my interpretation of what was going on was quite wrong. It wasn’t driving other wrens away; it was calling its chicks home. Apparently, when they leave the nest fledgling wrens pay no attention to anything said by their parents. So the mother wren was up late at night repeating herself, while her children wandered about oblivious.

It’s very easy to anthropomorphise the wren, and this is a tendency best resisted if I’m to think about it clearly. The territorialism is the trait most alien to me, the ruthless intolerance of another on one bird’s patch, except for mating and rearing young. Of course this has a clear rationale in terms of survival – it gives control over volatile food sources, which consist of beetles, spiders, flies and other small invertebrates. Seasonal variations can make the availability of these veer sharply from one month to the next. And it’s essential that wrens build up their weight for the winter.

Wrens have adapted well to human disruption. They probably do better in gardens than in the countryside, for blanket chemicals on the fields severely restrict invertebrate populations outside the much-diminished woods, while even the most “well tended” garden will have some redoubts for creepy crawlies where the birds can feed. Wrens are the commonest birds in Britain, with well over 8 million breeding pairs, according to the RSPB.

Their biggest threat is a cold winter. With so little volume to surface area, it’s very hard for them to conserve heat, and fluffing up feathers isn’t enough to save them. To combat it they achieve a psychological turnaround that would be astonishing in a human – they flock.

In the past they would have crowded into hollows in trees. In the era of the bird box they become fill-in lodgers, covering the gap between breeding seasons. A frosty night may bring tens of wrens into one box – the record is in the 60s. I remember watching a Johnny Kingdom TV programme where he’d put a camera inside a box. The wrens poured in, as if in an avian flash mob, spent the night peaceably, and in the morning went back to defend their territories.

I’ve never seen anything like that, but I regularly see two wrens squabble over our garden. It’s hard to tell who’s the ruler and who the challenger, who the winner and who the loser. Movement defines these disputes. They go so fast sometimes I think there’s just one bird rushing around by itself. Experience has taught me to wait and watch, and then I’ll see the other, dashing into the hedge. Then there is just one, barely visible in a tree. It dips into melody, like the equally unsociable robin, but then drills out a string of hard “r”s. The wren’s song is a key sound of the spring – but as frequent comparisons with machine guns indicate, not necessarily a comfortable one.

Movement is a chief feature of the wren even when it’s not driving opponents away. My overriding impression is of a fuzzy shape ducking, then shooting like an arrow out of sight. Then a tail flicks, another flight. That mother bird on the garden fence jolted up, jolted down, not quite in time with her calls. Until you see it still, it doesn’t seem to have a shape.

No shape, no form. It’s too facetious to imagine Plato running around our garden with hammer and nails trying to pin down the quiddity of the bird. That’s because the wren does have a “jizz”. This is a birder word (let’s leave aside other meanings). It might derive from the phrase “general impressions, sight and sound”, the guidance for spotters attempting to identify aircraft flying overhead during World War II. Or it might come from someone saying “it just is”. It “just is” when a long tail pricks up and back, and you catch a glimpse of a round belly against the light, just as the whole body flashes off in nothing more than an indication of wings.

In our present garden I see the indistinct shape taking off from the shed, gone into leaves on the far side. Then at the top of the patio steps it appears, darts along like a flicker of the eye, then comes back like a half-remembered idea by the pond. Our pond is big and deep, so it’s covered with steel mesh to stop children falling in. This is a good platform for our wren (if it is always the same one). It hops around on the metal, stabbing down into the water, where pond skaters and measurers also hunt for tiny flies and other arthropods. I’ve often wondered if I’d find soggy corpse floating in there one day, but it seems that wrens are so light, if one fell in it could shrug off the water and skirr away.

These sightings absorb me, but they are ephemeral. It must be clear by now that the wren is important to me, so closer encounters take on extra significance. The chief of these was on a freezing winter afternoon when I decided to move a bird box from a rain-lashed/sun-baked position at one end of the garden to a more chick-friendly one at the other. As I pulled it off the shed, it rattled, and I tipped a tiny frozen egg into my hand. I presume it had been abandoned the previous spring. Apart from the size, it was the texture of the shell that struck me most, slightly rough, chalky. I’ve not seen or heard any wren chicks in the garden since then, although we still have that one regular adult and its challengers.

Apart from that, the best moments are when a wren stops still, maybe a few metres from the kitchen window. It doesn’t last very long, but it’s fascinating. Wrens are what birders call “little brown jobs” – like many common British birds their colouring seems indeterminate, drab. Yet under that catch-all heading of “brown” there’s endless variety. Above the eye, for example, it’s almost yellow. Across the belly thin bands of darker feathers give it a fizz of activity even as it stands. I often catch myself thinking of the world in blocks of colour, and this is an essential corrective. Then there’s the posture – alert and balanced, the upright tail on the spherical body. It’s an affirmative shape, like a tick in the margin of the garden. Sometimes too I get a clear sight of its feet and legs, shiny black. The toes barely seem enough to support it on the ground, let alone allow it to hang almost upside down from a twig while it pecks at a nearby leaf. Then it cocks its head, dips its beak. With apparently no intermediate stages it’s in flight and gone.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of it, the first thing I recall once it’s disappeared, is the eye. It’s pure black, but with a great patch of reflected light. If I’m outside and a wren lands close by, I watch the head switch its gaze up, down, around, taking in the garden, me, opportunities, threats. There’s no recognition, none of the affection I lavish on it and the other birds that come into the garden. It’s not the jenny wren of folklore. It seems presumptuous to say that I know that the wren cannot feel affection, or sense any reciprocity in our relationship, but I’m fairly sure that whatever it does think will be unintelligible to me.

Even though the wren is not a threatened species in the UK, human interaction with it is typically unequal. For example, cities and suburbs are now these birds’ de facto habitat, after deforestation and intensive agriculture drove them from the countryside. Biologists, conservationists, birders and artists of various kinds have tried to determine wrens’ behaviour and lifecycle, model its distribution, explore its presence, draw meaning from its existence. Meanwhile each wren just goes on living, indifferent to the figure at the window.