Sizergh and Holeslack orchards in 'the hungry gap'

An apple feast in Sizergh orchard

On a bright and sunlit morning a deep frost holds everything in its grip. Leaves of snowdrops show but there are only the first single flowers.  The lake is frozen  and the sun sparkles on pattern where aquatic vegetation is trapped in ice.  Vegetables in Sizergh garden are rimmed with frost,  sunk low with the biting cold.  

In the orchard at Sizergh blackbirds and a few robins feed on windfall apples that lie thick upon the frozen ground.  It seems a barrowful has been given to feed the birds since windfalls were mostly cleared earlier in autumn.   I think I hear a note of fieldfare in the conifers that fringe the rock garden but I see none.
Walking toward the orchards at Holeslack we pass a field whose fringes have been planted with sunflowers, teasels and seed-bearing plants that will help sustain birds during the February hungry-gap when berries may well be exhausted- already eaten or frozen and rotten.  Fieldfare fly over the golden stubble and vanish.  I find them again in the Holeslack orchard but they're nervous. There are no windfalls,  almost no fruit on the apple trees so food is scarce.  The birds fly over the orchard trees but do not settle on the ground, nor are there sentinels in the top of conifers that surround the orchard trees.   I know them by jizz, by years of following fieldfare.   I wonder whether a rapid decline in numbers affects their behaviour-  there is safety in numbers, it is said.  Long-tailed tits show, with great tit and blue tit. A nuthatch calls from the cover of conifers.   The orchard fronts a public footpath to SIzergh so families with children and dogs come through the gate and their voices scare off the birds. It's a secret world.  Where sunflowers are planted on the fringe of the field there are small birds flitting about,  seeking seeds. Mostly flocks of goldfinch with chaffinch.