Outside here in the evening there are three or four thrushes within earshot, good voices with repeated phrases, not the most talented lyricists though (blackbird, or if you are lucky skylark, are the creatures for that).
At dusk a couple of nights ago there was a nightingale bawling down at us from the tall leaning oak that is the only proper tree left in the dell. Mighty voice for such an invisible little bird, and again only phrases (not whole lyrics), but extraordinarily varied phrases in range, tone, complexity...
Geoffrey Chaucer wasn't an ornithologist. They didn't have them in his day. But he knew melody when he heard it.
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Bonkers, our resident male blackbird, has been singing his heart out the last few weeks.
The trouble is, he starts at 4.10am sitting in the tree outside our bedroom window and boy is he loud for such a little critter.
He's been christened Bonkers because of his antics. We started feeding him raisins, cheese and apple when we had that spell of snow a couple of years ago and he's become quite tame since then. If we're sat in the garden he'll come and sit on the fence just watching us and singing. When he leaves he does a very low-level flypast no more than 3ft above our heads making what sounds like his alarm call. I prefer to think of it as his "Thanks for the raisins" call.
Curiously, Mrs Bonkers prefers apple and is currently going through one per day - halved and pinned to the ground with a kebab skewer. They have to be the cheap "Basics" apples though, she isn't keen on more expensive varieties. It's a pity Mrs K. isn't the same :-(
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That's an unusual post for a proper townie Lud, they don't usually appreciate the finer things in life;)
Our resident blackbird sings well too and brings his family to teach them how to have a bath in the pond.
Pat
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Perhaps they slepen all the night with open eye.
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And I thought this was going to be something like the sauerkraut problem I wrote about last year. Thinking about it, Chaucer would have been more direct about that.
}:---/
It was turtle doves for me last weekend. Not at home but in the woods around the Buckinghamshire cricket ground we were playing on. Couldn't see them, of course, but that bubbling call is unmistakable.
Sadly, nobody told the producers of The White Queen (hilarious, incidentally, and still all on the iPlayer if you haven't tried it.) But then, what are a few collared dove sound effects (first appeared in Britain in the 1950s, according to the RSPB) in what's supposed to be 15th-century England when there are clearly-visible zips on the costumes?
As for the dialogue, this week we had two examples of "I'm sorry for your loss," and one "I'll put my neck on the line." I suppose "prithee, fool" and the like would be as bad in its way.
Last edited by: WillDeBeest on Fri 5 Jul 13 at 10:15
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Perhaps they slepen all the night with open eye
Or rather "slepen al the nyght with open ye" because, naturally," so priketh hem nature in hir corages".
Actually, Armel, Chaucer wasn’t bad as an ornithologist and made an early catalogue of birds in The Parlement of Fowles. They sing a chorus to "welcome somer, with thy sonne softe that hast this winters wedres overshake, and driven away the long nyghtes blake! "
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>> Or rather "slepen al the nyght with open ye" because, naturally," so priketh hem nature in hir corages".
Do you know rambo, I had completely forgotten about The Parlement of Fowles although I seem to remember doing it for O Level all those years ago... at that age I thought it was terrible!
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Our resident blackbird Scruffy Junior is tame enough to take raisins from inches away from us but will not take from our hands like his father who died last year ..... he is so greedy that he has been known to stuff seven in his beak all at once to take back to the chicks in their nest in the laurel hedge.
He fiercely guards his patch and is currently engaged in a turf war with another male and there have been a couple of quite serious punch ups and peckings on our rear lawn accompanied by the blackbird equivalent of four letter words...... CH CH CH CH CH CH CH CH CH CH.......very noisy and similar to the warning noise they make when a cat is prowling nearby...
He does serenade us beautifully from the television aerial ... but not as beautifully as our resident song thrush...
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We have golden orioles in the garden sometimes. In the evening they drown out everything else with noises that remind me of the sort we used to make when girls from Debenhams computer centre walked by our print works. Makes me feel young again.
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People get all sentimental about birdsong - the lyrical music of creation's finest songsters, and all that.
In the real world it's all about defining and defending territory. That blackbird belts out his claim, then stops and listens to the other blackbirds doing the same nearby. Then he lets them have it again - at full blast. It's all rather fascinating, of course, but it's certainly not sweetness and light and they aren't doing it for our entertainment.
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>> it's certainly not sweetness and light and they aren't doing it for our entertainment.
Tsk, of course not. That's the wonder of it (so to speak): that we perceive 'beauty' in these alarm signals, shouts of rage, territorial chest-beatings and so on.
We're lucky to live here where there are several species that have a relatively low-volume but complex and jewelled discourse. In Australia for example the prevailing mode is one of simple, inharmonious shrieks and squawks. The birds may be bigger and brighter in the tropics but they tend to yell like fishwives. There must be exceptions but you have to know which they are.
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Saw a dead kestrel on the golf course this morning. Pecked clean with nothing but the wings, claws and backbone remaining. Not sure how it died. I doubt it would be foxes because they would leave a messy carcass, so maybe another bird of prey or more likely carrion crows. It's their territory and they won't let another predator bird near the place. And they can be quite relentless when they want to be. But I'm still surprised that the kestrel let itself be attacked, maybe it was old.
Last edited by: corax on Fri 5 Jul 13 at 17:35
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>> maybe it was old.
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It's one of those mysteries what happens to old birds. Do they all die peacefully in their sleep? Strange that they never just drop out of the sky, or fall off a perch.
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We are playing host to a homing pigeon at present. It's been around for a few days and has no real fear of humans. It very nearly strode into the house yesterday, but today Mrs. R. caught it and read off the number on its foot ring. After that indignity, it flew off in high dudgeon and has been sitting on a neighbours roof, eyeing us balefully.
Can pigeons give the evil eye?
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>> But I'm still surprised that the kestrel let itself be attacked, maybe it was old.
I'd back a crowd of crows against a kestrel, any day. The kestrel won't (shouldn't!) get involved if there's more than one.
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"I'd back a crowd of crows against a kestrel..."
But you don't get that very often - crows tend to be solitary. There's a country saying about how you tell a crow and a rook apart:
"A rook on its own is a crow; a crow in a crowd is a rook."
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And smale foules maken melodye - Kevin
