Sweet thrill of the thrush’s song
Even the rooks can’t drown out the thrush. And it is never repetitive, never the same full phrases repeated, always a twiddle or a sally at the end, or a variation in mid-flow.
Thrushes are surely the princes amongst the songsters; the nightingale alone, (and we do not have nightingales here), can compete. A Scottish lyric goes, “I have heard the mavis singing/ Its love song to the dawn...” and, yes, the mavis, the black prince of song, is indeed a bird of formidable voice, but for composition, falls short of his speckled cousin.
The older the thrush, the sweeter and more inventive the phrases. A young thrush will warble, will chatter and will, season by season, hone arias that become distinctive to itself. It learns to sing rather than to simply chorus the same melody. Unlike robins, goldfinches, linnets and so on, no two thrushes sing from the same hymn sheet. They are maestros of variable song.
“Split the lark — and you’ll find the Music/ Bulb after Bulb, in silver rolled”, wrote the little New England spinster Emily Dickinson, a woman who, although she rarely ventured far beyond Amherst, Massachusetts, got to the heart of things.In this case the lark’s rolling song delivered no doubt from a blue sky above a 19th century Massachusetts’ meadow. Some things, like the lark’s song, never change, but larks are fewer, more’s the pity. Even thrushes are fewer, although mankind never took to eating their tongues, as we are told Epicurean Romans did in the case of larks. Years ago, I heard a BBC radio programme say that in Coliseum times, many pounds of lark tongues were flogged at stalls along the Appian Way each morning.
How many lark tongues makes a pound? How much does a lark’s tongue weigh? Where could they possibly have found and captured so many larks? Were the meadows of Italy exploding with them? Was the sun blocked out by larks fluttering into the summer sky? They are a wonderful sight as they ascend, uplifting in every sense; they take one’s heart with them, fluttering aloft and hanging there, splitting the sky with song, bulb after bulb of plangent music. I wonder how many youngsters watch them now as we did when we were children?
Lying in the grass by the rivers of Tipperary, the lakes of Mayo or on the dunes of west Cork or Donegal, I watched larks every summer of my childhood. They were inescapable for a wandering boy, an accompaniment to his rustic leisure, drenching you with song.
Nowadays, the swaying blue grass of the silage prairies, (which, we are told, we desperately need to grow meat because we would die off, surely, if we only ate vegetables), support no larks, nor offer them a refuge. It was easy to find the nests. Watch the lark — and find its haven. One simply took note of where it landed, and it landed in more of less the same spot every time. It rose. It fluttered upward.
It climbed the sky until it was a speck against the blue, then descended in decreasing circles, threading the air. It landed, and ran a small distance: and there was its nest, with four speckled-brown eggs in a little tepee of dried grass or a sop of hay.
The rooks survive and seem to thrive. There are, quite literally, thousands of them in my local woods. These wet evenings, in the wind and rain, they weave their black nets back and forth across the darkening sky. They seek no shelter; they seem to glory in the blast. The grey crows too, counted in tens rather than thousands, thrive, carrying cockle shells from the ebbed bay. The ravens, numbered in pairs, rather than tens, survive, but haven’t yet begun to build.
Our dulcet singers are fewer than before but of a grim February evening the voice of a single divo transforms the world with its song.
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