Woe, calamity and ruin: your columnist admits a mistake
YOU may recall, perhaps a month ago, I wrote of finding a blackbird’s nest. I described the eggs as being of a blue so blue it outblued blue, the blue of childhood summer skies distilled, or something similar (the poetry was dripping from me that fine day like honey from a comb.)
Well, that was then and this is now. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I fling myself (to the extent these days that I am capable of flinging myself) at your feet, and I writhe in the dirt like a landed fish and I stretch out my arms and wiggle them like pectoral fins in a bid to scoop a little shower of dirt and stones over my undeserving skull. And as the gravel of contumely patters about my ears I moan with contrition. For, ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong.
I know, I know. Twenty years I’ve been writing this column, twenty good years (and no, I am in no mood to pun on the phrase ‘‘good years’’: I am too tired) and in that time I have been wrong a total of — reaches for the calculator and dances briefly with those long, sensitive, pianist’s fingers — no times. So the feeling of shame is as new to me as it is hateful.
Forgiveness I do not seek, ladies and gentlemen. It is the columnist’s duty to be right. But eine bisschen verstandnis, a little understanding, is that too much to ask? Perhaps it is. And anyway, that is for you to determine, not me. So I offer the following simple narrative, not as an excuse, nor yet as a plea for sympathy, but rather as part of the human urge to record the truth, however the world may sneer and scoff, however the world may simply disregard it.
It was the same feeling that prompted Whatshisname in the seventeenth century, when he was tried by the christian bullies of the day for saying that the earth went round the sun, tried, convicted and sentenced, to simply record the scientific truth and then put up with what they did to him, secure in the knowledge that it would stand when all the lies and the religious dogma, all the Trumpian stupidity, had blown away like so much thistledown. And so it proved. For truth is rock. Everyone has forgotten the names of those who persecuted him, who found him guilty of religious heresy, but noone has forgotten Whatshisname.
So the nest. I first became aware of it when walking with the dog and a smallish brownish bird burst from a bush quite close to me and flew off in alarm. I parted the branches — a pittosporum was it? A coprosma? I’m not sure, and, terrified of being wrong a second time, I’ll just say native — and beheld the nest of eggs. And since I knew the eggs of blackbirds to be blue and since I knew the female of the species to be brown, I leapt (to the extent these days that I am capable of leaping) to a conclusion. Here was a nest belonging to a blackbird — in scientific parlance, as I don’t need to remind you, Turdus merula — and I went home to write about it in the great pillar of veracity that is this column. It is as easy as that, ladies and gentlemen, to descend into error. One momentary lapse and twenty years of blamelessness are over. Ah well.
It was some days later that I discovered the truth. Back in the same place I stopped at a safe distance, reluctant to disturb the nest, and watched. And as I watched a bird arrived with insects in its beak, a smallish brownish bird. It dived into the bush and moments later reemerged, now insectless.
And there was no mistaking my mistake. I’d got my turduses confused. This was no Turdus merula, my friends. This, undeniably, was Turdus philomela, a song thrush.
Turdus may not be pretty as a name, nor yet indeed may thrush, but song thrushes I love. In spring they fly to the highest branch and belt their double carols out to all the world.
‘‘That’s the wise thrush,’’ wrote Browning, ‘‘he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
That first fine careless rapture.’’ Over the last three weeks I’ve watched the thrush raise a brood of three. But the pleasure I took from them was marred by the knowledge that I’d misled you, that I’d done you wrong. I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. More I cannot say. More I cannot do. Judge me as you will.
❛ Turdus may not be pretty as a name, nor yet indeed
may thrush, but song thrushes I love. In spring they fly to the highest branch and belt their double carols out to
all the world.