Gritty flakes of snow brush my face and an icy wind sighs through the trees, shivering the ‘lamb’s tails’ on the hazels. Under a leaden sky the countryside seems hard-faced and locked down.

The conditions are certainly reflected in the birds’ behaviour as I scatter seed and fill the feeders; they are frenzied, landing to feed when I’m only a yard away. In weather like this their challenge is to take on enough calories to make it through the next night. Within minutes the lawn is a twitching mass of birds – then abruptly they are gone, spooked by something, or nothing, and the stage is empty. They sit round suspiciously in the trees waiting for the all clear. How that is arrived at is always a mystery to me, but they gradually trickle back. We have a good selection of finches this winter: chaffinches, greenfinches, goldfinches, half a dozen bramblings, some delicate and confiding siskins and even an occasional redpoll. Add those to the tits, robins, dunnocks, plus the jays and magpies that come bounding in, and there are probably 150 birds queuing up each morning. The ethics of feeding birds intensively like this are interesting: it is a long way from natural, although not far from the weed seeds and spilt grain of farming 70 years ago. The feeding birds are undoubtedly targets for a sparrowhawk, which sometimes slaloms over the hedge at lightning speed and makes a kill – for which I feel a degree of responsibility. But then sparrowhawks also need to make it through the night….

photo: Dave Smith

We were very excited last week to have the first ever hawfinch recorded in the garden. It looked down on the feeding frenzy from a larch tree, preening and fanning its distinctive white tipped tail, but didn’t join in the scrum. Hawfinches are a local and declining species in Britain; they are also shy and rather elusive. Although strikingly patterned their most prominent feature is a massive bill, powerfully adapted for cracking the stones and extracting kernels from cherries, sloes, hawthorns and the like. Looking carefully through the binoculars we could see that ‘our’ bird had a yellow ring on one leg, which meant it had come from the population around Dolgellau, which is about 12 miles west of here. Dedicated fieldwork over many years by Dave Smith and others has revealed this as one of the most important populations of hawfinches in Britain: to date in excess of 800 birds have been caught and ringed to help understand the distribution and dynamics of these fascinating birds. If ever we get a better look at the bird in our garden and can read the ring we should be able to find out where it was hatched, how old it is and if it has turned up anywhere else. We don’t have the mature mixed woodland here that hawfinches are associated with around Dolgellau, but we do have ample sloes and haws on the untrimmed winter hedges, which can sometimes tempt them out into open country.

Despite the desperation of the birds to survive another winter’s night the plants are beating to a different drum. Demure snowdrop bells are opening every day and the frail early crocuses are reaching for the light. Even up here in the hills plant life is visibly inching forward, regardless of the weather – responding to the ever-increasing daylight. Although there could be plenty of harsh weather yet, spring is coming and nothing will stop that steady pulse – I can feel it in the air each morning. The birds feel it too, once their stomachs are full; greenfinches are wheezing pleasurably and the dunnock’s glassy plainsong sounds from the hedge. I feel myself quickening, like all other life, to the sound of that quiet drumbeat.