Lady Thistledown: Gilded wings and autumn things

Dearest Wild Reader,

What a joy it is to feel the turn of the season! Out with the frivolity of summer, and in with the warming comfort of autumn! I do encourage you, dear reader, to take notice of our wild neighbours, and watch as the trees don their fabulous autumn finery. The colours of the season are most certainly brown, red, and yellow – and no one, it seems, embraces autumnal fashion more seriously than the goldfinch.

Dressed decadently in the most luxurious shades of gold and ruby, these birds truly shine – a small mercy in a landscape that will inevitably turn a most dreary grey. One must listen as well as look, for the goldfinch has a most delightful tinkling song, like a chorus of tiny bells. They are well-immersed in their feathered societies, travelling in small gatherings known as ‘charms’ – and charm they most certainly do!

You may see them dangling from thistles and other vagrant plants in an acrobatic fashion, plucking at their seeds

The goldfinch prefers unruly vegetation, not our traditionally neat, trimmed, and weedless gardens. You may see them dangling from thistles and other vagrant plants in an acrobatic fashion, plucking at their seeds, often caught with my namesake, thistledown, stuck to their beaks – a most humiliating affair! Those of more humble beginnings may know these birds by their colloquial name, ‘thistle-birds’, due to their great love of this prickly plant. One must wonder whether what we so hastily dismiss as a weed is really a feast in disguise – must every garden in the Ton be so fearful of scrutiny?

So, dear reader, take pleasure in the beauty that autumn will bring to campus, watch for a fleeting, golden glimpse, and listen for a snippet of tinkling song. I watch now through the steam of my wonderfully fragrant Earl Grey, hoping that a dazzling, gilded finch may alight upon my window ledge – the true diamond of the season.

Yours wildly,

Lady Thistledown

Goldfinches on teasels, taken at Tocil Lakes. Image: Emily Hunt / The Boar