I love him best of all'

Beloved by poet William Henley and an inspiration to Paul McCartney, the blackbird is a melodic and delicate creature

It is late afternoon and I’m sitting on a garden chair soaking up the August sun, its bright warmth a soothing tonic that relaxes the very soul.

I sit so still that a male blackbird alights on the lawn only a few feet away and looks at me quizzically with a cocked head. He is unsure whether I pose a threat or not and flickers his wings nervously, uttering a couple of “tchook, tchooks”, the precursor to his full-blown alarm call.

But he soon settles and begins to forage on the mown grass, moving in a series of quick hops, before pausing to examine the ground. Through such methodical searching, he begins to snap up an impressive number of worms and other small creatures; the eye so keen that the slightest hint of movement is detected, no matter how miniscule.

The rich pickings clearly make my garden lawn a good place for this blackbird to be. Indeed, the blackbird is one of those birds that thrive best in the presence of humankind and among our dwellings.

If one was to create the blackbird version of utopia, then the final outcome would not be too far away from the patchwork of lawns, parks, bushes and trees found in suburbia.

Lawns are great places to find invertebrates because blackbirds are not hampered by long grass when foraging. Ornamental and native garden bushes offer safe nesting sites and provide berries in autumn to feast upon. In deep winter, when the soil is frosted hard, blackbirds take advantage of windfall apples on the ground and food on garden bird tables.

It is a mutually-beneficial relationship and it would be almost unthinkable to imagine our gardens without blackbirds because they bring so much, especially in spring and early summer when, at dawn and dusk, the melodic song of the handsome cock bird rings out all around.

The poet William Henley was certainly full of praise for the musical elegance of the blackbird’s song when he wrote: “The nightingale has a lyre of gold/The lark’s is a clarion call/And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute/But I love him best of all”.

On a personal level, one of my earliest nature memories as a youngster was finding a blackbird’s nest in the garden, low down in the fork of an elder bush. I remember being mesmerised by the dazzling orange gapes of the youngsters begging for food and I sometimes wonder if this was one of the catalysts that sparked my soon-to-develop passion for the natural world.

The blackbird I was watching moved across to the vegetable patch before flying up to a beech hedge and disappearing from view. All was well with him for now but the forthcoming winter will no doubt prove challenging. Good luck, I thought, there are so many dangers lying ahead for you; so much to face for such a delicate bird.

Blackbird numbers in autumn and winter are swollen by the arrival of birds from Scandinavia and northern Europe; many are on their way to wintering grounds further south but good numbers remain in Scotland.

“Tchook, tchook”: it is hard to imagine our gardens without the blackbird.