the best known of all our birds. The blackbird is quite as familiar by sight and by song, but many who know what the mavis’ eggs and nests are like, would perhaps be puzzled to describe the merle’s. The home of the hedge-sparrow, again, is well known, and, after a fashion, its appearance; but how many who hear it singing know who the small musician is? So, taken all round, the thrush is the bird we are most intimate with. And how welcome it always is on the lawn, with its charming plumage, and its pretty, half-timid way of coming out into public! “I hope I am not in the way?” it seems to ask, as it hops quickly out from under the shrubs, and as suddenly stops. “May I? Thanks.” And out it hops a little further, and again stops. But why describe so well-known a favourite? Tennyson has put words to its song, and the better one knows the bird’s song, the more admirable the poet’s words appear.
And the thrush sings alike, with constantly changing cadences but with always equal melody, when the wind is blowing bitterly over the tree-tops, when rain is falling, when the night is dark. In winter the poor bird, diffident of its welcome, seldom comes to the door for alms when others come in crowds. So if you have a wish to be kind to it in its days of pinching want, scatter some food farther from the house, out of sight of it, and there, if you go cautiously, you may always see the starved thrushes gratefully accepting their little dues of crumb and meat.
“The Blackbird whistles down the vale,
How blithe the lay.”
Scott.
“The Merle’s note
Mellifluous, rich, deep toned, fills all the vale
And charms the ravish’d ear.”
Grahame.
The blackbird is the shadow of the thrush: you seldom see or hear one without the other: nor, indeed, is either of them often mentioned alone. Yet the blackbird is probably the more commonly seen. For one thing, it is a very conspicuous bird; for another, it is not so diffident as the thrush. It is the blackbirds that you see flying out of the cherry-trees and strawberry-beds, but if you set nets for the marauders, as I did one year to stock an aviary, you catch quite as many mavises as merles. The former, it is said, are among the fruit “looking for worms,” but I doubt it. They are not so bold in their depredations as their black cousins, but I fancy they are more sly. Blackbirds will fly away with a cherry in their beaks or a strawberry without any affectation of innocence: the thrush, when startled, goes off “empty-handed.” But throw down a handful of fruit, especially raspberries, in an aviary, go aside and watch which bird is first at the feast—it is the thrush.
The blackbird and thrush are really two birds of very dissimilar character: the same traps will not succeed as well with one as with the other, nor is it so easy to rear the former as the latter. Country people declare that the mothers poison their young ones when caged, and a poet says:
“The timid blackbird—she, that seen,
Will bear black poisonous berries to her nest,
Lest man should cage her darlings.”
Whatever foundation there may be for the belief, I found that if I caged a nest of blackbirds (leaving the cage in the bush and the top open for the parents to go in and out), the old birds would visit the nest, presumably with food, with the greatest diligence, but the young birds would be dying in two days. The thrushes kept their young ones alive.
Where do our blackbirds go to? They rear in nearly every case two broods a year; that is to say, there are every year five times as many blackbirds as the year before. According to this, starting with a single pair, a garden ought to have at the end of five years fourteen hundred, and at the end of ten years, supposing that one half died each year, something over two million blackbirds. Or, supposing they only rear one brood, there would be over seven thousand. Suppose the cats eat six thousand, there would still be the preposterous number of a thousand left. Where, then, I ask, do all the blackbirds go? It is quite certain that each pair, as a rule, hatches five birds, yet the number of blackbirds does not increase. So that if we say there are only ten thousand pairs of blackbirds in Great Britain, there are at least fifty thousand killed or made away with every year. “Then, what are they hatched for?” my child-friend might ask. “For cats” would be my reply. And yet it seems absurd that a hundred thousand blackbirds should be hatched every year just for cats to eat. All of which is a mystery to me.