Blackbird
Lofty soloist, dusk scolder
Is there a lovelier sound than this?
The blackbird’s song is mellow, unhurried and rich.
It’s varied, but not exhaustingly so (hello, song thrush).
Ornithologist W H Hudson described it as ‘nearer to human music than any other bird song’, and this may lead us to notice that the register is lower that many other songbirds, in the range of human speech.
You can whistle along to a blackbird.
The song can be especially noticeable and welcome in urban streets, where a blackbird may well be the only bird singing. The notes are almost always delivered from a high perch, whether chimney stack or treetop. This helps the sound carry, even above the noise of traffic.
Blackbirds sometimes also sing at night, when you can appreciate them all the better.
No sleepovers thanks
Blackbirds do sing occasionally in mid-winter, but they don’t really get going until early spring. A more reliable sound to listen out for in the colder months is the distinctive alarm they give as they go to roost.
During the short winter days blackbirds seem happy enough to share space with each other. It’s not unusual to see several adult males hopping around the same lawn or field edge.
But while they sometimes tolerate company in daylight hours, blackbirds like to sleep alone. Just before dark, as they settle into their separate roost spots (typically an ivy-clad tree or wall), they will proclaim them with this insistent ‘chinking’ call.
At dusk, on a still evening, you may hear it in surround-sound, from all directions across the landscape.
I associate the sound with being on the last leg of an afternoon walk in January. It’s a reminder to step a little quicker, if you’re to get home before you trip over in the dark.
Next week: Great Tit
There’s a Shriek of the Week every Friday from January to June. If you know someone who might like a dose of birdsong in their inbox, please pass this along.
You can now support Shriek of the Week by becoming a paying subscriber. This gives you access to narrated audio versions of each Shriek, and an invitation to a monthly ‘Early Bird Club’ call with me to listen to the dawn chorus.
And if you want to immerse yourself in song knowhow, consider joining us for the British Birdsong Essentials course, beginning again in February. There are five spots left for the first run.
What’s going on with the audio clips?
Substack, the platform we use to distribute Shriek of the Week, is currently displaying links from Soundcloud (where lots of audio files are stored) very poorly on the emails. So we’ve switched to sharing videos on the emails, while embedding the Soundcloud files on the website version of each Shriek (where they still work).
For the best experience, click on the name of the bird in your email to go to the web version and you can hear the audio on the same page as you read the text. We’ve contacted Substack to see if we can sort out this issue. Thanks for bearing with it.