Skip to main content

Blackbirds


Walking my dog today, I noticed that a few of the feijoas are flowering. The feijoas made me think of blackbirds, Turdus merula.

Unlike the thrush which sings through the winter, the blackbird remains silent until the spring when it becomes an annual competition among birders to record the first blackbird singing. The song usually ceases in December but has been heard as late as February. The blackbird's song is very much the largest part of the dawn chorus here in town and far out numbers the Tui's. Last summer there was a blackbird which persisted in singing at night on top of the old council building accoss the road, something to do with the street lighting, I suppose.

Ornithologists have noted that birdsong uses the same musical scales as we do. Certainly many composers and poets have taken a great deal from birdsong. Mozart had his pet starling and Beethoven his blackbird, which may be heard in the opening rondo of Beethoven's violin concerto in D, Opus 61. In many species it appears that although the basic song is the same for all members of the species, young birds learn some details of their songs from their fathers, and these variations build up over generations to form dialects. Living in towns and cities birds pick up other sounds as well and may incorporate them into their songs.

But I digress. I started out talking of feijoas which in their native South America are pollinated by birds, mostly the tanagers. The blackbird, together with the myna, have learned the trick of pollinating them in New Zealand. Small birds, such as white-eyes, visit feijoa flowers but research here has revealed that they are ineffective pollinators.

I used to watch blackbirds from the kitchen window on my farm in the Bay of Plenty take apart the feijoa flowers, feeding on the sweet and juicy petals of the brightly coloured flowers, but have yet to see them perform the same trick here in Greytown. My blackbirds here seem to prefer cherries and grapes, while the feijoas languish and produce very little fruit. I'm curious to know whether or not anyone has observed them pollinating feijoas here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tunnel-web spiders and golden hunting wasps

My wildlife experiences these days are pretty much confined to my backyard and a daily ramble around the village of Greytown, New Zealand.  During my daily walks, it is the birds which attract my attention:  skylarks, (“Hail to thee, blithe spirit”), goldfinches, (“gaillard he was as a goldfynch in the shawe”),  black birds, (“shouting all day at nothing in leafy dells alone”), the song thrush, greenfinch, chaffinch, dunnock, california quail, house sparrow, eastern rosella, Australian magpie, starling, yellowhammer –foreigners all. Most of them were introduced in the nineteenth century as bio-agents to control plagues of insects brought about by the wholesale destruction of the bush and the consequential severe disruption of the eco-system. I welcome them all, knowing that in the not too distant future we may be lucky to see any bird at all.  I do see the odd native bird; kotare, the kingfisher, pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo and its dupe riro, the greywarbl

The Precipitous Decline of the Birds of the New Zealand Countryside

With all the hullabaloo about the impact of intensive farming on waterways, the impact on birds has been overlooked.  Millions of birds have been lost from New Zealand countryside over the past thirty odd years. Most of them were introduced birds so have not been missed but surely someone should have recognised that their loss indicated something had gone very wrong with farmland ecosystems.   We have a survey on New Zealand’s backyard birds, initiated by Landcare Research, but no up to date information on the birds of the countryside. The only comprehensive data we have is from the Ornithological Society of New Zealand’s  Atlas of Bird Distribution in New Zealand 1999-2004 which was published 2007. It was noted at its launch that  the Waikato region had become  a "bird desert" probably because of the dominance of dairy farming in the region.  Birds have not, it seems, fared quite so badly on the less intensive meat and wool farms,  but very little, if any,

The Turnstone

There is this bird, beautifully patterned, black and white, and brown, a small bird, smaller than a thrush or blackbird that breeds on the Arctic tundra and then  flies here to New Zealand every spring.    and here am I, just turning over stones.