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A Little Bird Told Me...

By Clark Nida

Today the blackbird who owns my garden came to say hello.

He’s been singing beautifully in the evenings, his voice echoing romantically through the mean streets of Whitby. Blackbirds are notorious busybodies and make it their business to know everything that goes on in their patch.

In the days when I used to go camping every summer weekend, I used to lie for hours listening to the blackbirds’ songs. They had triangulated the woodland for their territory and spent the warm evenings calling to each other from their chosen trees.

What were they talking about? After a while I felt sure I could understand.

For those who don’t know, the typical song of a male blackbird is a shortish series of matter-of-fact notes emitted in a leisurely fashion, followed by a brief, highly variable suffix. This turns out to be an imitation of some other bird species. I’ve a notion what he’s saying is, more or less:

“Hi, I’m Bob, I’m a very fine blackbird, and we’ve got some of these on our patch: (bub-boo-boo)...

“And one of these: (cuckoo)...

“And no end of these: (chirrup!)”

In short, they’re the newscasters of the neighbourhood. And, passing on messages as they seem to, they furnish the wilderness with a rudimentary telegraph system.

I heard one at the end of Church Street once, near the bottom of the 199 Steps. There’s hardly a tree around there, until you get to the allotments farther up the hill. But a few houses have a tiny walled patch of garden, and I reckon from the echo of his shrill voice that’s where he was.

He started up his confident song and ended with a sharp “Chirrup!” (Sparrows.) Then he fell silent. There was nothing else around but sparrows (unless he cared to imitate a gull), and he couldn’t think of anything else to say. I felt so sorry for him.

It’s not just other birds that blackbirds will mimic. A year or two back The Sun carried an article about a blackbird whose territory abutted an ambulance station: the bird was clearly mimicking the ambulance siren. The newspaper offered a downloadable sound-file on its website as evidence, in case anyone should doubt it. The blackbird couldn’t do a glissando, so it approximated the rise and fall of the siren with an arpeggio: a string of very short notes. I’d say the bird guessed the siren to be some sort of urgent warning and deemed it important enough to pass on.

Blackbirds also give out cat-forecasts (“cat coming into your sector... now!”). You see cats, strolling out for a prowl in the gloaming, twitch in embarrassment. “I do wish that bird would shut up. Now everyone knows I’m here.”

From which I’ve learned one word of Blackbird: “quis!” (meaning: cat). In some dialects that becomes “squit!” Or maybe the word refers to any ground-based predator. The cats know what it means. So too, I imagine, does anything the cats might be hunting.

Normally blackbirds affect to ignore people and their activity, but just you try hunting rabbits. Then you are continuously scolded and pinpointed, the remonstrating bird adopting a position directly above you (and incidentally trying to defecate on you). It’s noticeable how all birds recognise a gun, and can tell it from a stick no matter how smooth.

Not that I’ve hunted rabbits for a long while. But when I did as a younger man, I enjoyed the feeling of being something hidden and lethal. Soon however I came to realise I wasn’t being particularly lethal: just hurtful.

Why blackbirds are such pals of rabbits I have no idea. But they are – and Beatrix Potter knew it too. Readers will recall that Peter Rabbit, trapped in Mr MacGregor’s garden with the irate owner bearing down on him, was visited by a mob of birds who “implored him to exert himself”. Less a romantic conceit than a precise observation, I’d say.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that rabbits turn up a lot of insects as they nibble the grass: things they don’t eat themselves (as far as anyone knows). Things the blackbirds are pleased to relieve them of.

The blackbird isn’t unique in communicating with mammalian species for the purpose of warning or food-seeking. Another passerine is the tropical honeyguide, which habitually leads people or large animals like badgers to bee colonies, benefitting from the wax and grubs in the looted nest.

When I was small, my mother used to refer to privileged or anonymously received information as “a little bird told me...”. Next time my blackbird comes to greet me, I shall ask it if there’s anything I ought to be aware of. And pay attention carefully.