A noise invades my dreams. I wake to the dark void of a December night and the bright, quickfire trill of a bird.
The complex song, with its rapid, rat-a-tat volley of notes – unmistakably that of a wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) – sounds out for a second time. It reminds me of being woken by the dawn choruses of early spring, but this is a lone voice, and instead of early dawn light filling the room, everything is black obscurity.
During the breeding season, this tiny bird, which weighs about as much as a pound coin, produces a noise so loud and reverberant that it seems to defy physics. Today’s is more muted, perhaps because of the energy-saving demands of winter, but it still sounds vivid and defiant, its piercing clarity accentuated by the surrounding silence. I listen for a while, finding the noise a comforting reminder of life in the darkness.
Not all wren-caused awakenings have been looked on so kindly. In Ireland, various myths involve the birds singing at a bad time: waking up a jailer as Saint Stephen was trying to escape, or betraying warriors trying to sneak up on an enemy camp.
Such stories justify the (no longer literal) tradition of “hunting the wren”, which still continues in a few places across Europe, particularly in the west of Ireland and Isle of Man. Such festivals always take place in midwinter, often on 26 December (the feast of Saint Stephen), when the bird’s song is conspicuous amid the general lifelessness.
These traditions could be seen as mere persecution, but they are also imbued with a kind of veneration. Irish rhymes accompanying the custom refer to the wren as “king of the birds”, a title that goes as far back as Aesop’s fables, and is reflected in its Dutch name: winterkoning (winter king).
I get up, part the curtains and look outside. In a bitter easterly wind, silhouetted bare tree branches sway against moonlit clouds, and dry leaves scrape across flagstones in the garden below. Winter is punishing for wrens, and one in four of them won’t last until spring. But, for now, my tiny king of the cold still sings in the dark.
