Sweet sound of music

Much to his delight, the song thrushes are thriving near Keith’s home and their sweet songs are a joy to his ears

Maybe it’s just a peculiarity of my own home area but song thrushes seem especially abundant this spring, with the sweet liquid fluty notes of the cock birds ringing across Strathdevon at dawn and dusk.

On my regular early morning walks up a small hill overlooking the strath, I usually see several of them sitting on their treetop perches from where they deliver the most extraordinary melodies.

The noise is all around, a glorious singing competition with each bird seemingly intent on outdoing the other.

The range and variety of the song is immense, with each phrase generally repeated before moving on to the next.

It was a song thrush in full flow at dusk that inspired Thomas Hardy to write of a bird that had “chosen to fling his soul upon the growing gloom” with an “ecstatic sound” of “joy unlimited”.

This year, song thrushes were in full flow from the end of January onwards, several weeks before the first blackbirds had even thought about tuning up.

I’m not sure why song thrushes are doing so well in my local patch but perhaps recent mild winters have helped spark a recovery in numbers. It would be interesting to see if this is a nationwide trend.

This is a most wonderful time of year and one can sense a real buzz of excitement among our birds as they prepare for breeding. By a small plantation on the edge of the Ochils, I watched a tiny coal tit court a female by flying around in a circular bounding flight, almost as if to say “look at me” as he twirled excitedly in the air.

In this same little pine wood I could hear the gentle tinkling of siskins as they too seek out mates but the highlight for me has been the return of skylarks to the sheep pasture that clings to the sides of my morning walking hill above the strath.

For some inexplicable reason, skylarks were absent from here last year and, oh, how I have missed that beautiful liquid trilling song. The whole body of the cock bird shivers with passion as he soars ever upwards into the heavens, delivering a rich outpouring of notes and sometimes hanging in the air for several minutes before rapidly plummeting to the ground again.

Nest building is also well under way for many of our birds. A female blackbird has been bustling to and fro with dead grass in her beak as she weaves her nest in the fork of a laurel bush in our garden. Blackbirds build here every year but the nest rarely succeeds because of marauding crows.

These crows have their own nest in a tall beech tree behind our house and it wouldn’t surprise me if the adults, when sitting on eggs, pass the time by watching the comings and goings of songbirds below, identifying their nesting sites in anticipation of future plunder.

Song thrushes are a plentiful sight and sound near Keith’s home – and he is very grateful for that.