Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Dear Editor,

If fieldfares were people, you just know they’d love tattoes. ”Fevvers, mate? Well they’re all right for flying, but it’s not what I call art. You seen my latest, just down ‘ere?”

In the Kyiv Botanical Gardens (more a tree park, with some nice magnolias) fieldfares are the enforcers, a sort of aerial vigilante force to keep the hooded crows away. “Crows? I ‘ate crows. My brother got eaten by one, y’know. One of my earliest memories, that bloody beak coming into the nest. Can’t abide ‘em”.

Wherever you are in the Gardens, you’ll hear a fieldfare rattle somewhere nearby. It serves as an alarm call, a threat call, a mating call and a battle-cry. In fact it has to serve as pretty much everything, since fieldfares are the thrushes that don’t really do song. “Never got the point of it myself, tone-deaf I suppose. Bit fancy for me, all that trilling. I mean, what you really need to know, really need, is if there’s a bloody hoodie on the prowl, know what I mean? No mistaking that rattle now, is there?”

The other morning I heard a blackbird alarm call down by the swings—quite genteel scolding that rises in pitch and tempo as it gets more agitated. Sure enough, a hoodie was sitting in a chestnut looking down on the kids with a malevolent eye. The blackbird’s mate flew up and the scolding grew to fever pitch. The crow remained, well, not indifferent, just mildly irritated. Then like the bugle of the 7th Cavalry, a rattle started up by the metro station and swept down towards us. The crow didn’t even look round, just slipped off the branch and powered away, ducking its head for the inevitable fly-past. The fieldfare and the crow disappeared over the trees, slipping and wheeling, with the rattle now sounding a triumphant “Yee haw!” The blackbirds had called in air power.

For anyone more used to seeing fieldfares foraging in a wintry English garden, seeing them nesting in a Kiev spring comes as a bit of a shock, like seeing an old photo and realising that granddad must have been a bit of a rake in his time.

“You from London then mate? Lovely city, Mum and Dad used to spend their winter hols there every year. They said the food was amazin'-you could get worms all year round. Imagine that. Me, no, never been. They taught me English though—oh you guessed it did you? Somefing to do wiv the accent, like?”

Tim Grout-Smith