The bird that sings after the others have given up

It is not yet six, the sky is the colour of wet slate, and somewhere below the window a robin is singing its heart out to nobody at all.

This is the wrong time of year for it, or so you would think. By October most of the summer singers have fallen silent. The warblers have gone south, the blackbird has packed in its evening performance, and the dawn chorus has shrunk to a few hardy stragglers clearing their throats. And then, into all that quiet, a robin on the garden fence lets rip as though it were April.

The bird that works the night shift

The robin is one of the very few that carries its song through autumn and into the depth of winter. It will sing in the half dark, often from a post near a streetlight, and a robin going at full voice at three in the morning is the reason a good many people are sure they once heard a nightingale in a city they do not quite believe has nightingales.

There is another thing most people do not know. In autumn it is not only the males. Female robins hold their own patches of ground through the winter and sing to keep them, which makes the robin one of the rare British birds where you cannot tell the singer's sex from the song alone. Two robins trading verses over a frosty hedge may be any combination you like.

Why bother, when everything else is quiet

Spring song is mostly about courtship and a nest. The autumn song is a colder business entirely. It is about food. As the leaves come down and the insects vanish into the soil, a robin that holds a decent scrap of ground, a hedge, a few borders, a compost heap left to rot, is a robin that eats. One that is pushed off it may not see March. So the sound you hear on an October morning is not romance. It is a small brown bird on a fence telling the dark, very firmly, that this hedge is already taken.

I find that steadies me, somehow. We soften the robin into a Christmas card and forget that the thing on the card is a working animal defending its livelihood with the only tool it has, which is its voice.

What the counting shows

I have kept notes on three winters of robins now, from this window and from a scruffy bit of ground behind the terraces where the bins live. The counting is slow and for a long while it means nothing at all, which is the honest truth of most field work. But a pattern has started to surface. The robins that sing earliest and hold on longest are the ones on the richest ground, the overgrown corners, the gardens nobody tidies into bareness. Where everything is paved and swept, the song thins out and some winters stops.

That is a small loss, and I will not pretend it is the whole story, because the robins are still here and still singing and will almost certainly outlast my notebooks. But it is worth saying plainly: the scruffy corner you have been meaning to deal with, the pile of leaves, the hedge gone shaggy, is very likely the thing keeping a voice in the dark through January. You could, if you wanted, simply leave it. The robin will take it from there.

The leaf pile is doing more than it looks. Where the Ground Breathes follows rain, leaves, fungi and small animals through the living soil beneath ordinary places.