My Mr "B"

For the past three years we have had a pair of Blackbirds living in the Holly Bush (or is it a tree at about 30') that borders our front garden.  We can always distinguish Mr B, as we call him, because he has a grey feather sticking out from his wing.


We hadn't seen him much over the past couple of months so imagine our delight when we spotted him two weeks ago.  I had read that they live 2 - 3 years (although Cath tells me (and I believe her above the RSPB) they can live for about 9 years) so imagined we had lost him.


Blackbirds are mainly ground feeders but when I looked out of the kitchen window the other day who was feeding but my Mr B.  Not a particularly good photo, taken through the kitchen window, but one which I will treasure along with a couple of others taken last year.

See his grey feather (looks almost white in the sun)

Here he is sharing with a Blue Tit

If you go to http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/blackbird.htm you can actually listen to a blackbird singing.   The website also features a poem by William Henley - the first verse says it all for me.

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.

Then of course there is the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence, and the theme of  the poem Adlestrop by Edward Thomas:

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier, 

Farther and farther, all the birds

of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire

and I cannot miss out the Beatles track

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

All your life,

You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Rightio, off to look through my window and see if the Tits are nesting in the two new boxes Chas put up for me earlier this week.