Feather weights thrush it out
THE SONG thrush shares a name with Coronation Street’s most timid character yet has the temerity to behave like the Eastenders’ Mitchell brothers.
Mavis Wilton, played by the inimitable Thelma Barlow, won the nation’s hearts with her unassuming, submissive ways on the wet cobbles ofweatherfield for 26 years.while Mavis may have frustrated viewers by dithering and dallying, her bird namesake can hand out some surprisingly feisty levels of violence as I discovered last week on one of my lockdown exercise excursions.
Song thrushes have been colloquially known as Mavis since time immemorial, with Chaucer alluding to the name in his writings.
How it came into common parlance across East Anglia as well as parts of Scotland and Ireland is one for the etymologists.
The French “mauvis” has been used to describe a number of birds, particularly redwings and larks, and may have arrived with the Normans, while the origins of this word may date back to the Celts.
Whatever its roots as a bird name, the term Mavis is unlikely to have derived from the kind of behavioural traits exhibited by two rival song thrushes contesting a plot of grassy escarpment to establish a nesting territory rich in snails and worms.
Male song thrushes traditionally stake their breeding sites by delivering musical repertoires as rich and hypnotic as any British species, the fluid notes repeated from high perches with gusto as if each one is deserving of an immediate encore.
The quality of the song thrush’s vocalisations and their rivalry with those of the fabled nightingale are celebrated in its official scientific name, Turdus philomelos. According to Greek mythology, Philomela, the daughter of the King of Athens, was turned into a beautiful songbird by the gods as a lasting legacy after being violated by her brother-in-law.
Rather than using the power of their voices, the two male song thrushes I was watching turned to old-fashioned fisticuffs to decide the ownership of the nesting real estate.
What had first drawn my attention to their aggression were the sounds of loud thwacks.these were being delivered by the thrushes as they jumped up and down aggressively, bringing down their stiff flight feathers on each other’s wings.
Like two doughty pugilists, the thrushes began each round with a degree of posturing, crouching down, raising their back feathers like hackles and then jumping up to a foot in the air to deliver the loud, feathery blows. Later, looking through textbooks, I discovered antagonistic behaviour is not unusual. One of their fanciest manoeuvres is plucking brightcoloured flower petals and waving them like matadors flair their capes.
Interestingly, I found no mention of song thrushes actually trading blows in the style of Tyson Fury.
Aggression in birds is an everyday garden occurrence, with blue tits, wood pigeons, blackbirds and house sparrows all showing feisty sides in spring. In some ways, watching the normally passive song thrushes throwing their weight about is a positive sign as it reveals increasing competition for nesting sites, possibly because of rising numbers.
Once suburban mainstays, song thrush numbers have shrunk by 48 per cent since the mid-1960s, although we may be seeing a comeback, with reports of increased breeding success in recent times.
‘Trading blows like Tyson Fury’