Blackbird magic
As days lengthen and winter recedes, the blackbird’s gorgeous liquid voice joins the dawn chorus. But how much do we really know of this familiar garden songster? Nicola Chester reveals the hidden life of the blackbird
With a song like the light through slow-poured honey, the coal-black male blackbird, with its yellow-gold bill and matching ring around a big, dark eye, is familiar almost everywhere. Along with the subtly dappled, earth-brown female, blackbirds live alongside us, sharing spaces we have created or appropriated; urban, suburban or rural. Appearing almost tame, yet quick to scold with indignant, loud alarm, they accept us as just another animal: reminding (sometimes reprimanding) us, that’s what we are.
Our most neighbourly and recognisable member of the thrush family is never far away. Gardens can provide excellent habitats with food, shelter and nesting places in the form of shrubs, hedges and climbers. Close territories are defended by gatepost posturing, with wing and tail flicks. Males (and, to a lesser extent, females) patrol borders, lowering their head into a run like a rugby player with the ball, often using lines we have created as boundaries along a path edge, kerb or roof ridgeline. If this doesn’t see a rival off, a fight on the ground ensues.
“Their low-frequency song has evolved to travel through dense woodland vegetation”
Blackbirds are ostensibly a woodland bird, and can be heard loudly and furiously flinging leaves about to find insects, eggs and grubs beneath hedges and shrubs, like a teenager who has lost something on the bedroom ‘floor-drobe’. Large light-gathering eyes, circled by a ring of Romani gold, give them good visibility in low light. In the countryside, this makes them early risers and late sleepers. In warmer, suburban settings, they lie in longer, though some stay up very late under artificial light, street-lamp-singing into the night.
Similarly, their low-frequency song has evolved to travel through dense woodland vegetation. And what a song: rich, melodious, languid and sensual as a torch singer in a smoky nightclub (including a throaty chuckle at the end). It is a song delivered with insouciance, whether from a barn roof along a quiet country lane or the top of a bus shelter in the suburbs. An old phrase “to whistle like a blackbird” is to do something effortlessly. Ornithologist and writer WH Hudson thought it closer to human song than any other bird, and this is true, in phrasing, tone and tune. Repeated phrases even sound like human words. The blackbird is our family’s ‘treacle birdie’.
CAPTIVATING CALLS
Though they have a bold, commanding, intelligent demeanour, blackbirds are also highly strung; this seems to emanate from righteous indignation more than anything. A hysterical, rising and falling shrill is a familiar reaction to perceived threat, but an urgent ‘chuck, chuck’ greets ground predators, such as cats, stoats and weasels, and a high, thin ‘seeeip’ calls out aerial predators, such as sparrowhawks or owls. Evening brings the sounds of the pre-roost ‘pinking hour’, where bird after bird repeatedly calls what is possibly a false alarm, of ‘pink pink pink’ or ‘whit, whit, whit’, sending nervier birds elsewhere to roost and ensuring their own safe space. It is an atmospheric chorus of steel on flint, chipping off sparks to trim a night-light.
It’s no surprise that blackbirds abound in myth, legend and art. From Kenny Hunter’s modern frieze of cinematic, stop-motion birds in London’s Leicester Square, to the three birds accompanying Celtic Queen Rhiannon in the Welsh book of medieval tales, the Mabinogion, they transport people between worlds through their song. Blackbirds seem of us and our world in a profoundly ordinary way, yet also, as poet RS Thomas puts it, with “a suggestion of dark places” about them.
INSET Juveniles are similar in appearance to females, but with more coppery-brown spots and streaks
SING A SONG OF BLACKBIRDS
We have put blackbirds in dainty dishes to amuse kings (tucking them mercilessly under a pastry lid) and caught roosting birds to supplement meagre rural diets as late as the 1940s – although some of these ‘black birds’ were doubtless young rooks. Poets and songwriters have celebrated the blackbird as a symbol of human suffering and struggles, from love, to witch trials and the oppression of black people. This includes artists as diverse as Rachel Unthank, Sam Lee, Jeff Beck and singer-songwriter Marley Munroe, aka Lady Blackbird (after the 1966 protest song by Nina Simone about the struggles and pain of black women).
The Beatles’ Blackbird is said to address the civil rights movement, too, and a blackbird features in Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) as witchvictim. Blackbirds recur in the work of Kate Bush; in a witch-trial in Hounds of Love (1985) and in a video about the end of a long relationship And So Is Love. Her eighth studio album Aerial is saturated with birdsong, including Kate riffing along in an extraordinary call-and-response duet with a blackbird that merges into one voice. The album’s cover masquerades as a mountain range at sunset, but is actually the waveform of a blackbird’s song.
Poets recognise a bird that has endured with us through time, too; for Edward Thomas in his pause-poem Adlestrop, where unending blackbird song ripples across counties in a moment of profound peace before the outbreak of war, to Seamus Heaney’s “picky, nervy goldbeak – on the grass when I arrive, in the ivy when I leave”, and RS Thomas’s “slow singer… loading each phrase with history’s overtones, love, joy and grief”.
FINISHING NOTES
The blackbird is a gateway bird to social and nature cohesion. It’s a bird we all have access to, whether in deepest countryside or a suburban garden. It is a woodland bird that shows us even our urban human spaces can be woodlands, too: include nature in our planning, and be rewarded by song and wellbeing. They are a way into a connection with nature for a child (or anyone). Watch from a kitchen window, as one hunts with a listening ear and pulls a worm out of the earth in the gruesome comedy of an elastic stretch.
Blackbirds don’t yield their ground, they challenge us, dare us even, with a cocked head and bright, enquiring, gold-ringed eye, to live alongside them in a better world, where we are part of the same nature, pausing in awe in a saturation of honeyed song.
Nicola Chester is a countrywoman and writer who lives in the North Wessex Downs. Her book On Gallows Down is out now (Chelsea Green Publishing).
FACT FILE
• HABITAT
Blackbirds live almost anywhere, from woodland, gardens and parks, to coasts, countryside and brownfield sites – everywhere except the highest peaks.
• DIET
Includes insects, caterpillars, berries and fruit. Earthworms are a staple (blackbirds suffer in droughts when worms are under baked earth). They will even take tadpoles from shallow garden ponds.
• BREEDING
Varies with the weather, but is a long season (early March to late July) with two to three broods raised from three to six sky-blue, or sea-green, brown-speckled eggs.
• NEST
Built by the hen, the nest is a deep cup, beautifully crafted from twigs, grasses and other natural materials, plastered in with mud. Typically low in a hedge, bush, climber or even sheds and porches.
• CHICKS
The hen incubates eggs, which hatch after two weeks. Both parents feed chicks, which fledge two weeks later. They become independent a mere week later.
• LIFE SPAN
Averages three to four years, although the oldest known wild blackbird was 21! Cats, cars, loss of habitat or access to food in a harsh changing climate are the biggest threats.