Six miles of hedgerow hung with frozen rowan berries lead up to Kitebrook, and on the evening I climbed them the hedges were singing. It began as a dry tapping, a bill against a fence rail, repeated until the rail answered in the pitch the flock wanted. Then four notes came over the wall in a chord, round and sweet and held far longer than I thought one breath could hold. I had come to see the Carolers, and they had heard me coming. My boots squeaked on the packed snow, and the chord stopped for exactly as long as it took me to stop walking, then went on.
The oldest account is a page of the Mistlebank parish book from the winter of 1794. On Christmas Eve a flock of four tall gray birds walked in at the churchyard gate and sang until dawn, and the vicar, who had prepared a long sermon, closed his book and listened. An entry thirty years on says the flock came again and the village had begun to leave out cranberries. By 1911 they were arriving in the first week of December and singing in parts. Each visit has added a few birds, and by the 1950s there were nine. A Caroler is a stilt-legged wader five feet tall, wedge-bodied and frost-gray, with spruce-green barring on the folded wings and a bare, pleated throat pouch the red of holly berries. The pouch is the instrument. The bill opens, the neck stretches, the pouch swells like a lantern, and the note comes out long and clear. The birds at Kitebrook wear small red-and-white knitted scarves, left on the gate by the children, and the leader tucks a sprig of holly in the feathers of her crown.
Lars Holt, who keeps the farm at the bottom of the lane, says the tallest bird always sings half a beat late and everyone else waits for her. This has been so since his father's day. The pettiest rivalry in the parish is between his gate and the vicarage gate, where the flock stops second and sings less. Between my first visit and my last, the flock grew from nine to eleven, and the chord moved up a third.
The instruction the locals give is flat and kind. Put a bowl of frozen cranberries on the step, switch on the porch light, and stand inside until the last note. Then take the bowl in.
- Classification
- Winter-singing wader, flock bird
- Habitat
- Hedgerows and dooryards in deep snow
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 ft tall at the crown
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Snowbound farm country
- Binomial
- Cantator hiemalis
- Diet
- Frozen rowan berries, cranberries, eave moss
- Temperament
- Musical, devoted, a little vain