IT’S ALL JUST beginning. Outside, I can hear the house sparrows, and they’re all at it like mad: eyes meeting across a crowded hedge.
Every cock is bursting with desire for a hen; every hen is ready to sell her virtue, and she’s telling the world that it’s going cheep. And behind all this chatter and kerfuffle you can hear the flat, eager burble of the hedge sparrows. It’s not much of a song, but it’s sung with passion. These two species of drab, unexceptional little brown birds are filled with brightness and excitement, because they can feel the coming of spring: and they are all ready to start springing. All the birds are.
That is, unless you are a certain Mr and Mrs Blackbird and you live in the Wirral. For there is the truly astonishing news that a pair of Cheshire blackbirds have not only got it together and mated and nested and laid eggs: they have already fledged a brood of young. For them, it is practically autumn already.
To bring this extraordinary business about, the eggs will have been laid before the end of December. Blackbirds normally lay around the end of March: the laidback, fluting song of the blackbird normally cuts in a couple of weeks earlier as they prepare for the big event. They lay three or four eggs, which they then sit on for a fortnight. When the chicks are hatched, they will be fed by the adults for 16 days until they are, quite literally, fully fledged and ready to fend for themselves.
These early birds have redesigned the way blackbirds live. It is not that they had a go that is remarkable: it is that they have succeeded. This Cheshire pair, brought to light in the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden BirdWatch, are an extreme example of the growing trend for earlier nesting: or to put another way, earlier spring.
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Climate change is happening before our eyes and ears: and the behaviour of plants and animals is the best way to monitor this.
And the pioneering blackbirds leave you with a strangely divided mind: in part dismay at the extent and the relentlessness of these human-made changes, and in part a delighted admiration for the adaptability of the blackbirds. Alas, not all species will prove so versatile as the march of change speeds. Including, perhaps, our own.