This is definitely the year of the blackbird, announces our chief bird watching, bird caring correspondent. In one smallish garden, well covered, it must be, said, by creepers and clematis of various kinds, and an adjacent shrubbery of thirty or forty, yards she says there are at least five blackbirds' nests. Maybe the hard winter brought many in from the countryside to her Dublin suburb, maybe the usual influx from points east was heavier than usual. Anyway, just now there is intensive, swooping and diving and feeding and splashing in the birdbath.
As to the feeding, one of the great sources, she tells us, is in the gutters around her house and greenhouse. Daily as she goes out her front door, scatterings of last year's beech leaves from a big tree near it, spread around the entrance. Clear it up and the next few yards of gutter are dug up for the fine juicy worms which apparently abound. How otherwise to feed the black horde? Well, apple cores and skins and other fruit bits, for example. She doesn't any more put out bread because that drew down the jackdaws and magpies and both are nest wreckers.
This really is one of our handsomest birds and just now, at fiveish in the morning it is in full voice. You could forgive it for awakening you. Especially now that the thrush is so scarce in the district. You know how your breath condenses on a cold morning? Well, in the year 1953, this letter was published in the English Field.
"Sir, As I lie in bed, I see a cherry tree outside my window against, a dark background of pines. At about 5 o'clock each morning a blackbird perches on the cherry tree and sings. The other morning I was surprised to see its breath condensing to a little white cloud each time it sang - it looked almost as though it were smoking a cigarette. The same thing happened the next morning, which was also frosty. Everyone has noticed a horse's breath on a cold day, but am I very unobservant to have reached the age of 60 before noticing the same thing when a bird sings? Yrs, Colin J. Smithells, Chalfont St Peter, Bucks.
Elizabeth David in her book Italia Food (Penguin), mentions a Sardinian delicacy consisting of thrushes or blackbirds with myrtle leaves, but we won't go into that.