Just as I turned into Worley Place off Ward St in central Hamilton I heard the first few faint little notes. But it took another five minutes before I could track him down.
He was sitting high up on a front corner of the old CML building – now grandly known as Garden Place Apartments – and his shiny black coat and bright orange beak marked him out easily as a male blackbird; and he was high up surveying his little fiefdom. Occasionally he warbled a few more bars of song, but a good deal of the time he was agitated, fidgety, flicking this way and that, obviously on the lookout.
His missus, not exactly drab in comparison, but certainly more mutely clad in speckled dark brown, was busy on the ground below him, diligently searching across the sweep of lawn at the rear of Garden Place.
I watched her dig out several good-sized worms from the rain-soaked ground, shaking and cutting them into more manageable pieces until, with her beak crammed and still wriggling, she flitted furtively up into the thickening foliage of the big spreading claret ash, made sure the coast was clear and then darted suddenly into the dense branches of the tall candle-shaped conifer that overlooks the entrance to the underground car-park.
She made several forays out on to the lawn area, foraging largely undisturbed in the dense drizzle and delivering her string of take-out meals to the youngsters using the same careful, cautious, circuitous routine.
At one stage a surveyor’s assistant wandered out on to the lawn, clad in a fluorescent yellow jacket and carrying a long metal measuring pole. He was totally oblivious to the fact that he’d scared Mrs B. away and interrupted her daily hunter-gatherer efforts.
She simply zipped up into the claret ash and scuttered about a few metres above the pole-carrier’s unsuspecting head, anxious to get a proper beak-full before she made the next delivery.
But the surveyor, protected from the rain by the Em-Bar-Go verandah, needed a series of measurements, and the pole-carrier stayed on for some minutes.
Exasperated, Mrs B finally dived back to her chicks with a meagre offering only, and stayed sulking anxiously out of sight for 20 minutes.
Mr B., meanwhile, was seriously about his male duties, flitting from high point to high point around the taller buildings facing on to the city centre, watching, guarding, and occasionally extolling aloud and beautifully the virtues of his chosen mate and their patch. But suddenly I saw him lean forward with an intensity of expression it is hard to imagine on such a small face.
An interloper – the male blackbird who normally lives around near the Westpac building in Victoria St – had the damned temerity to fly into one of Mr B’s ginkgo trees near the front of Garden Place. With absolute outrage Mr B flung himself off the building, torpedoing down, flaring his dark wings at the last second as he hurled in on the intruder and chased him rapidly right out of the area. For some minutes thereafter Mr B. stomped pompously around on the scaffolding above the old Woolworths building, making sure the unwelcome visitor didn’t try his luck again.
The odd starling, a mynah or two and a small, lippy mob of street-kid sparrows were all variously working patches in Garden Place, and Mr B. was quite happy to allow them to do so. But any other male blackbird, should he have the effrontery to venture anywhere over the boundary lines Mr B had marked out, was in immediate and dire strife.
Just leaning on a wall outside the library, there’s some wonderful little tableaux played out by the city’s smaller residents.
Yet it’s the song of the male blackbird that has always intrigued me, and somehow has also always been the harbinger of major seasonal changes.
As a kid, wandering about the Otewa Valley farm, with its barberry hedges, clumps of hawthorn, belt of big pines behind the house, and small blocks of trees dotted about the place, there was an abundance of blackbirds endlessly fossicking on the lawn, across the paddocks or around the piggeries. In the way of country kids, we learned to interpret the male bird calls – the sharp, clipped “chink-chink-chink” when a cat was on the prowl; the harsh, ululating screech when a bird was suddenly startled and fled with pounding wings; the soft, shy, tremulous little songs sung diffidently from deep inside a bush in the dusk of a late autumn evening; and the long, rich, full-bodied Welsh-choir offerings floating down from the high top of a still-leafless oak or plane-tree just as the first light of dawn cracked its way across old Eric Taylor’s eastern skyline in the early spring mornings.
There’s a blackbird singing that same glorious melody just outside our bedroom these mornings – he’s been at it each daybreak for the past couple of months, regardless of the weather, and it’s an absolute delight to listen to.
And in this tree-rich city of Hamilton, with its plentiful parks and lawns, where blackbirds are catered to by accident yet bountifully, there are hundreds of them.
It always gives me a buzz, walking through the humming, busy, usually serious-faced central city in the middle of a rush-about weekday to hear, cutting through the hurly-burly of bustling people, those clear, crystal notes offered by little Mr B. and his ilk. Blackbirds have been in the country only 150 years, introduced from Europe by early settlers.
Yet in that short time they’ve made themselves quite at home, and they seem pretty happy about it. Me too.
Kingsley Field is a Hamilton writer. He has published two volumes of these columns and I now working on a third. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz