Some few days back I commented on the hen blackbird I had been watching as she gathered material for her nest before disappearing into a neighbour's fir tree. I haven't seen her for several days so I don't know if she has finished the nest and is sitting on eggs or if she has abandoned that site and started afresh somewhere else. The cock blackbird, however, is very much in evidence. He spends a lot of time high in the sycamore tree in another neighbour's garden, singing his heart out. I noticed yesterday evening that he had started quite a while before dusk and was still going strong an hour later. I took a camera down the garden in the hope of taking a movie of the apple blossom buds while capturing his song as a sort of background music. He immediately moved to a tree farther away but was still loud enough to record. However, when I came to play back the movie there was no sound. Maybe that camera doesn't record - I'll have to try with a different one, perhaps this evening.
This morning something woke me just after 5.00. What it was I couldn't say and it wasn't long before I dropped off again. But not before I had noticed the blackbird was singing again in the sycamore. When I woke again soon after 7.00 he was still at it. He didn't stop until just after 9.00 but was back on song again by 10.00.
I love listening to the song of the blackbird. It always reminds me of two things: walking to Scouts as a teenager when, at this time of the year, there was always the song of the blackbird to accompany me down the road; and the trilogy by John Masters, Loss of Eden (Now, God be Thanked; Heart of War and By the Green of the Spring). Set in Kent and the western front during the First World War, these books bring home the futility of war and, at the same time, how war can bring out the best in some people. And the connection with blackbirds? One of the principal characters is executed for cowardice (he was suffering from shell shock) and as he is led out to his death he hears a blackbird singing.
The blackbird is one of the "finalists" in the Battle of the Birdsong being run by the National Trust. Five species have been selected by naturalists and the public are asked to vote for their favourite. The five species are blackbird, robin, song thrush, blackcap and swift. (See more and listen to the different songs right here.) I'm not sure that their recording of a blackbird is the best: ours certainly sings better than that. What surprises me is that the skylark is not one of the selected species. As things stand I shall have to vote for the blackbird, but if the skylark were there I would find it difficult to choose between them.
(I've just had another look at that web site and I can vote for the skylark. Oh dear, what a decision.)
The song of the skylark can be downloaded here. This, to me, is the sound of the South Downs.
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