Bird of the Month: Song Thrush

By john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

And after April, when May follows And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge – That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! Robert Browning, from Home-thoughts, from Abroad

The ‘careless rapture’ of the well-named song thrush ( Turdus philomelos) stops us in our tracks. Its voice carries and can be heard in darkest winter, save in the hardest weather, unlike the melodious blackbird’s; and both sing in town and country. ‘There is a thrush in Speaker’s Court,’ wrote Alan Clark in his diary for 15th June 1988, from the Palace of Westminster, ‘who sings goodnight so beautifully each evening. When I can, if I’m in my Commons office, I come upstairs to listen. How could anyone shoot a songbird?’

Like the blackbird, the song thrush is an inventive singer, increasing its repertoire with age, and capable of incorporating snatches from other birds’ songs. Each phrase is repeated two or three times and a bird can have over 100 different phrases. Repetition means it sings a total of over a million phrases in a year. BB wrote of one he listened to late into the dusk in his Northamptonshire garden: ‘He was singing out of sheer joy and wild delight in living’ ( The Idle Countryman).

He also admired the beauty of their eggs, the nest lined with mud, at odds with the feathered softness most songbirds prefer. ‘It is a never-failing source of pleasure to see those lovely, azure, black-spotted eggs reposing in their mud casket (which should be lined with black velvet). For they seem to me very like precious stones.’

As many as three clutches of up to five eggs between March and August have not saved the song thrush from a sorry decline – in the UK, by 54 per cent (1970-2010) – and it remains listed red for danger.

The latest Avian Population Estimates Panel (see British Birds, February 2020) registers a UK population of 1.3 million, while blackbirds number 5.55 million. It has been worst hit, like many other bird species, by intensive farming.

Gardeners value its taste for snails. It uses stone as an anvil for cracking shells. On lawns, it cocks its head like the blackbird and stands still as if listening for the worms. In fact, it is concentrating its gaze for surface movement. Worms can descend a foot underground when soil freezes; and snails then ‘lie up’, inactive, as they ‘overwinter’. Both events mean thrushes starve. Apples and pears, fallen or provided, are life-saving substitutes.

But it is the rapturous song that stirs the poets: ‘Here again, here, here, here, happy year!’ O warble, unchidden, unbidden! Summer is coming, is coming, my dear, And all the winters are hidden. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Throstle