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Spheres with tails: our enduring love affair with the thrush

Mark Cocker

These round songbirds have inspired not only some of our best poets, but have also sewn the seeds of the countryside around us.

It has been suggested that humans are hardwired to respond positively to other animals with rounded shapes that mimic those of our babies. Such creatures, runs the argument, are inadvertent beneficiaries of our parenting instinct and thus enjoy greater public affection. We can see it at work perhaps in the popularity of hedgehogs, puffins and owls (and, if recent internet trends are anything to go by, pygmy hippos).

I wonder if it helps explain our attachment to thrushes? The birds can puff themselves out until they look like spheres with tails. Not only are their shapes rounded, but four of the six British species bear spots upon their pot-bellied breasts. They are rounded in both shape and in pattern.

One thing we know — they stand among the most beloved of British birds. I have known people so intimate with individual thrushes in their gardens that the birds would enter the houses to feed or take food from the hand. One local friend has had the same female blackbird nest in his garden for six years. Not only can he recognise her, but she knows him and she calls him specifically when she wishes to be fed. Often, the relationships are ongoing, passed down between generations of the same bird family.

There is some ecological evidence to suggest that our affections for thrushes are reciprocated. The blackbird is arguably the most popular of all, but it was originally an inhabitant of pristine forest, to which its mellifluous song is sonically adapted. Blackbird vocalisations have a low frequency and such sounds carry better through the dense foliage of wooded environments. Yet blackbirds have, in part, forsaken forest. Their favourite sites now — the places where they achieve their highest breeding densities — are suburban gardens. We love them and, it seems, they, in turn, love to live alongside us.

The blackbird has adapted from living in forests to living alongside humans in urban environments. Credit: Getty

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For all our familiarity with thrushes, people still sometimes muddle one with another. The redwing and fieldfare — which can usually be seen only in winter, when they visit from Scandinavia or Continental Europe — are the easiest to recognise. The first has a glorious terracotta patch along the flank and a broad cream stripe above the eye, whereas fieldfares have blue-grey heads and rumps divided by a broad burnt-chestnut band across the wings.

The most problematic pair are the two residents, mistle and song thrush, which are essentially brown with copious spots across the whole of their buffy undersides. Yet the mistle thrush is much larger, paler and scarcer. There are only 165,000 pairs in Britain and for every one of them, there are almost eight song thrushes.

Yet even the most famous of English verse has not been spared from our occasional confusion about thrush identity. In The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy described how, leaning on a gate at last light on December 31, 1900, he imagined the physical scene before him as a corpse of the old century just passed:

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

In the final lines, the poet asks how his thrush could be so assured of ‘some Blessed hope’ when all he could divine in the landscape was wintry desolation. The other key puzzle in the poem is exactly which bird had so affected the poet. Mistle thrushes often sing in December and sometimes earlier. They have a further reputation for relishing wind and rain when they sing, hence an old vernacular name, stormcock. This could account for Hardy’s reference to the ‘blast-beruffled plume’, but mistle-thrush song is simple, repetitive with a rather melancholic quality that is not easy to square with his reference to ‘joy illimited’.

On the other hand, no thrush — no British bird, in fact — is more able to convey a sense of Panglossian optimism than a song thrush. The performance comprises a series of duplicated phrases delivered with almost physical force and, as these repeat rounds pound out across the countryside like mortar fire, the listener can feel bombarded by its sense of wellbeing.

The identity of Hardy’s thrush may remain open, yet not the source of the emotional effect described in another great thrush poem of the 20th century. Adlestrop by Edward Thomas describes an unscheduled pause at a village train station in Gloucestershire. The moment seems unscripted and without consequence (‘No one left and no one came/On the bare platform’), until the poet’s reverie is broken by the slow-fluted notes of a solo musician, from which unfolds Thomas’s blossoming sense of momentous beauty:

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Adlestrop was written in 1917 in the depths of the First World War and is permeated with a sense of lost innocence. However, it also attends to aspects of life that are at the very foundation of human happiness, such as birdsong, that are all the more cherished for seeming ordinary and inadvertent.

There is a further precise observation in the poem, because birds such as thrushes do sing at the same time. It is especially the case at dawn, when millions of song thrushes and blackbirds unite, not perhaps at precisely one moment, albeit certainly in the same hour. They also perform on hot, dusty June afternoons like the one at Thomas’s Gloucestershire station. The abundance and ubiquity of the thrushes mean that their song is the default background to our daily lives and it embeds them not only in our sense of place, but our sense of ourselves.

We could argue that thrushes are not merely part of our emotional relationship to landscape, they are implicated in its very structure.

The matter relates to their diet — all the British species are well known for the consumption of invertebrates and especially worms. Pictures of blackbirds pulling an enormously elasticated annelid from the lawn are almost an archetype of thrush behaviour. Ted Hughes rather over-eggs this carnivory when he writes in his poem Thrushes that they are ‘Nothing but bounce and stab/And a ravening second’.

The mistle thrush, named after ‘the very plant and fruit with which the bird is intimately connected’. Credit: Getty images/iStockphoto

However, there is a softer aspect to this behaviour. During autumn and winter, thrushes feed substantially and sometimes exclusively on berries. Our forebears honoured this when they named one of them the mistle thrush. It is easy to overlook the implications, yet it identifies the very plant and fruit with which the bird is intimately connected. The ecologies of mistletoe and mistle thrush go hand in glove even today.

Our ancestors also understood these connections because they loved to eat fruit-flavoured flesh, including roasted thrushes. Revd Gilbert White may have been a great lover and recorder of Nature in his Hampshire parish of Selborne, but he was not above eating some of it. He writes about the pleasure — ‘juicy and well flavoured’ — to be had from a plate of ring ouzels, now the scarcest and most enigmatic of the British thrushes.

As every child once knew from the ancient nursery rhyme, our forebears were familiar with pies from which blackbirds — four and 20, to be precise — could fly out and start singing. The thrushes did not miraculously survive the baking process. The crust was pre-made and under the pastry lid the chefs would insert live birds, even snakes and other animals, to the apparent delight of the banquet guests. It was known as a ‘surprise pie’ and it is this which explains the dainty dish once set before a king.

Thrushes and fruit were not only an important source for old English folklore. The role played by birds in the dissemination of berry-bearing shrubs or plants is a process at the very roots of European Nature. Thrushes are some of the most prolific, creative makers of the countryside.

The enigmatic ring ouzel is now the least common and the most elusive of Britain’s six species of thrush. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Go down any hedgerow almost anywhere in this country and you will find hawthorn, blackthorn, elder, bramble, dog rose, holly and other fruiting shrubs in a random, but repeat pattern. Some of them will be deliberately set by the land-owner, although alongside any planted trees is an unofficial slew of bird-sown species.

Another commonplace encounter is to find the same sapling plants, particularly young hollies, springing up along the edges of tall woods. The scenario that explains their origins is not difficult to imagine. Flocks of winter thrushes fly in at night to roost. By morning, they have made a deposit of seeds, each with its little parcel of fertiliser.

One of the more surprising plants intimately connected with thrushes is yew. We often think of it as a churchyard familiar, but yews are lovers of limestone and will grow clean out of cliffs, as they do here in my native Derbyshire. The most striking thing about these dark evergreens is that every part of the tree is deadly poisonous, including the seed, except the fleshy aril that surrounds it.

The yew advertises these sweet fruits to birds through their bright scarlet colour. Thrushes invariably answer the call and, in so doing, plant yew saplings wherever their droppings fall. The overarching impact of all this tree-planting should not be underestimated. We think of it as ‘our’ land because we possess the title deeds, yet, in truth, thrushes are often in charge. They are literally curating places that meet the future needs of their kind.

These birds, with their glorious songs that have been embraced as the essence of our islands, are also active participants in their maintenance. Is it any wonder, then, that we should find them embedded in our folklore, our culture, in our everyday lives and in our hearts?

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist

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