It's not about the dunnocks

...even though I managed to get a couple of snaps of them.

The dunnocks always spend a long time deciding whether or not to move into open country. They can spend a minute or so looking and considering before they hop onto the green box.

The garden robin is always unwilling to be visible.

And the tits are not big fans either.

I seldom get photos of wrens, but one day one landed close to me, looked at me briefly, and flew off. Then the next day I saw two chasing each other - I sight I had never before witnessed. I mentioned, I think, that the Dutch call them Little Winter Kings, and it turns out there is a long tradition aligning wrens with the death of the old year and the coming of the new. That's because they sing through winter. St Stephen's Day (26th December) used to be celebrated by boys catching poor little wrens as a ritual... I was interested to read this from a conversation on, I hate to admit it, ChatGPT:

The wren embodies the spent sun — the old king who must die for the new light to return. His ritual death ensures renewal, echoing countless solar myths (Osiris, Baldr, Lugh).

In this way, the wren becomes a kind of sacrificial microcosm — small yet cosmically significant, the life that must fall for the wheel to turn.

Now, it so happened that when I asked Aulus, the Guardian Oak, what bird he was associated with, he said the wren. And I was surprised as I had seen a robin and heard blackbirds, tits, and skylarks, but never wrens in that place. It turns out though that wrens have long been associated with oaks.

The wren was sacred to the Celts long before it became entangled with Christian festivals. In Gaelic it was drean (Scotland) or dreathan-donn (Ireland), meaning “the druid bird” or “little brown one.” Its prominence in midwinter ritual almost certainly predates Christianity.

• The Druids were said to divine the future by observing the flight of wrens — a practice known in Latin as auspicia (bird-omens). The wren’s darting, unpredictable flight made it a kind of messenger from the Otherworld.

• Because the wren sings all year, even in the depths of winter, it embodied the continuity of life amid death — the eternal song of the world.

• Some sources describe the wren as the “oak-king’s” bird, linked to the sacred groves where the Druids performed their rites.

• The wren’s smallness and strength of song aligned it with the Celtic idea that true power lies in hidden places — the anima of nature rather than brute force. It was thought to carry Awen, the breath of inspiration, which bardic poets sought through ritual trance and song.

For some reason, I couldn't indent that information from the wicked AI program, so the highlight will have to do.

There is also an interesting connection between wrens and foxes:

The wren sometimes appears in contrast with the fox in folklore — fox as cunning in action, wren as cunning in word or song. In that sense, the wren’s mētis (Greek for crafty intelligence) is linguistic and symbolic, while the fox’s is embodied and practical. Both are embodiments of adaptive cleverness — survival through wit rather than dominance.