28th May 2018. We went to close the sliding window to our back garden at about 2115 (BST) tonight, but were stayed by hearing the mellifluous song of the common blackbird, Turdus merula. We paused, listening to its ever-changing improvisations on many basic themes. The blackbird, with its ‘Warblings at Eve’ as the old song has it, is so common, even in large cities, that we tend to ignore it, beset as we are by the toils and troubles of everyday life. I hastened to bring out a camera, to make a short recording of it. It was a Bank Holiday today, so the hum of urban life was less than usual. So here is three minutes of the Evening Chorus of the blackbird…

This blackbird is common in Europe, and also in south-western Australia, and all over new Zealand. One imagines that people took specimens of merula there – possibly to remind them of the Old Country, from which they had emigrated? I don’t know; but I for one, have always found the song of the blackbird at dusk (it continues well into Autumn) when it is already quite dark, as a poignant sound of Optimism in the face of the Winter that is to come, and the rebirth of all that will inevitably follow in the Spring.