The chaffinch is one of the most popular song-birds in Britain; it is very much with us, being universal in its distribution in this country, and a bird that attaches itself to the neighbourhood of houses, an inhabitant of gardens and orchards, and a resident throughout the year. He is a pretty bird, and, if not a brilliant songster, is at all events a very vigorous one; his lively, ringing lyric, being short and composed of notes invariably repeated in the same order, is capable of being remembered longer and more vividly reproduced in the mind than any other song. Sitting by the fireside in January, you can mentally hear the song of the chaffinch; but the brain is incapable of registering the more copious and varied bird-music in the same perfect way—the music, for instance, of the skylark and thrush and garden-warbler. It is not strange that, when Browning wished to be back in England in April, he thought of the spring song of the chaffinch, before that of any other species.
O to be in England
Now that April’s there;
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs of the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England now!