You will probably hear it. But will you be able to see it?
The wren is one of our tiniest and yet loudest resident songbirds, and finds a home in nooks and crannies all across Britain.
Its song is bright and consistent. It can go on blasting out that same sequence with incredible fidelity, hour after hour.
The strength and regularity of the song, with its penetrating trills, are the clearest giveaways.
It’s a good one to pick up through repeat exposure, because you can hear it all over the place - most urban parks, field edges and woodlands have their wrens, but windswept hillsides, coastal headlands, lakesides and marshes often have them too.
Another clue is that wrens seem to lack an ‘off’ button. They can be heard on bright winter days, and continuously from early spring, through summer and well into autumn.
Wrens are ground-huggers, and tend to sing from a low perch. This may be perfectly viewable on a branch or fence post, but can easily be hidden out of sight.
And when not singing, they’re likely making alarm calls, often giving away their presence in nearby cover.
They have a couple of common ones. One is an abrupt stony tck! that can be strung together into an intolerant trill. The other is a slightly softer, but nevertheless insistent, scolding.
Among all bird calls, these from the wren are perhaps the most helpful clues to the presence of other animals in the landscape.
The trigger is often a cat or a person (perhaps you), but it could also be a fox, stoat or something else low to the ground that might otherwise pass you by.
Wrens are an invaluable guide to whatever else is happening.
Crevice dwelling
Their Latin name Troglodytes troglodytes (‘cave dweller’) refers to their knack of finding shelter in the stony crevices that most birds avoid, or perhaps just can’t fit into. This gives them purchase in places with less vegetation, such as cliffs and mountainsides, where other songbirds can be few and far between.
And while you rarely see more than one or two wrens together at one time, in harsh weather they may huddle together for warmth in the same roost. The most remarkable account concerns over 60 birds piling into a single nestbox in Norfolk one winter’s evening.
The Eurasian wren is found across Europe and also in the Far East of Asia. More than two-dozen sub-species have been described, including those distinctive to Scottish islands such as St Kilda and Fair Isle. For more on the wren’s ecology in the UK, see the BTO website.
🔊What might the wren sound like in ‘bird-time’?
Listen to the 64 distinct notes of the wren’s song slowed down and get a sense of its true complexity, courtesy of recordist Chris Watson, via the BBC World Service (2 minute listen).
Next time: Song Thrush
Thanks for reading and listening. This is the second instalment in 2025’s cycle of Shriek of the Week. You can catch up with Robin here. That post also includes details about how all this works.
For those in a position to do so, taking out a paid subscription to Shriek of the Week supports me to write more and improve what I do. It also gets you an invite to our livestream hopping Early Bird Club call, on the first Saturday of the month (8-9am UK time), and discounts to some in-person events in the UK.
To all those who have supported Shriek of the Week over the past year: thank you!
A note for current paid subscribers: It appears a large number of existing subscriptions were cancelled all at once at the end of June 2024. This seems to have been a technical fault with the payment provider (I’m looking into it). If you find you are no longer on the paid tier, but think you should be, please look out for a further update once I know what’s going on. 🧐
LINK OF THE WEEK
🌍 Still doomscrolling? Try Antidote
Perhaps, like me, you tend to turn to the natural world for solace in troubling times. But as the news seems to grow ever more unhinged I realise I want stories about people too - specifically, non-celebrity people coming together to make tangible change where they are, without waiting for global politics to come good.
Antidote has been set up to get more of this kind of news in front of us, and provide an off-ramp for our habits of doomscrolling.
There are many kinds of mini-stories here, told with energy and wit and in ways that are easy to share. Laugh, cry or cringe, I guarantee you will hear about action that’s taking place away from the doom news radar that might just give you a different perspective and a lighter heart.
Visit Antidote, and let Matt Golding and the team there know what you think.
🐦⬛ More from Birdsong Academy
Join an early morning walkshop in London or Brighton this spring
Explore the A-Z archive
Credits:
Image by Siegfried Poepperl
Thanks to Mark Cocker & Richard Mabey for the account of roosting wrens in Birds Brittanica.
Share this post