Latest news with #blackbird
Daily Mail
01-07-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
I can't stop my neighbour felling this glorious tree - BECAUSE it's in an area of outstanding natural beauty
The blackbird who has made his home in my garden has become something of a friend. He potters about on the grass in search of worms immediately after I've finished mowing and takes a keen interest whenever the compost heap is turned over to reveal all kinds of nutritional goodies.
The Guardian
26-06-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Country diary: Listen closely, as the breeze scrolls through June's playlist
'Listen!' said nobody, probably the breeze, but it felt like the right thing to do. There's a pile of branches cut from fallen horse chestnut boughs next to a storm‑blown beech tree, a still life from carnage that makes a good place to sit. 'Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits,' (an old Shropshire saying), and the breeze strengthens with thoughts it has gathered and shunts through the sky. From somewhere south, clouds lumber over the horizon at a snail's pace, in a daydream of rippling air, eating these country miles. The chime of a cuckoo, or the memory of one, haunts the breeze. It brings a rare clarity, as if elsewheres that are usually smudgy and far have been drawn into the same nostalgic field. Blown in by deja vu, distant hills of the Wrekin, Caer Caradoc, Long Mynd and Stiperstones loiter on the margin. Close by, a blackbird sings into the clear airflow, and another improvises a reply from further trees. Oaks sigh on their outer surfaces but inside their leaves patter like rain. Birches dance as if submerged. Earthmovers at the waterworks groan and a grime track is sucked from a cab and lost to the breeze. Two wasps hover around a burrow, their buzzing dispatches from the world to the hidden colony stifled. A robin shuffles feet at a gatepost. Along the lane, the frequencies of pink campion, white bramble and yellow buttercup are picked up as the breeze scrolls through a June playlist; their beautiful flies, fading. Down by the brook, the breeze and the meadow grass are having the same idea: silver dogs racing down the valley, chasing the myth of a creature shaken from shadows. Sawn logs on the horse chestnut pile hold their own recordings of summer's joy and strife in annual rings. The beech tree, although downed and with most of its roots in the air, has a couple of branches full of irrepressible leaves. Listen, the ruins of these trees have their own stories to tell of a lost garden. All these things and their thoughts are winnowed out, to be whispered into the future on a breeze. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: Last spring feels a long time ago in the allotment
On the allotment I have learned what a blackbird fledgling sounds like. I knew the calls robins make to their chicks and the returning sounds from the nest, the searching 'feed me!' of great tit and blue tit fledglings. But the blackbird is new to me; I'm enjoying the intimacy of now knowing, not least because the mosquito-borne Usutu virus is threatening blackbird numbers, and my days of hearing their fledglings may be short lived. Its parents have left it in the elder tree above the dipping tank, and there it fizzes melodiously, asking for food. As I fill my watering can, I catch glimpses of its fat, box-fresh body; I watch its clumsy hops, its startled ruffling of feathers. Already it shows signs of the blackbird charm: hot and bothered, put out, clucking over nothing. It's nice to see there is food for it to eat: earthworms dug up by fellow allotmenteers, along with caterpillars and other grubs. Three years ago, in the drought of 2022, there was little such food available. A blackbird followed me around my dusty plot and I dug up earthworms for him, hoping he had enough to take back to his chicks. This year, despite periods of near-drought, there has been enough rain to keep the blackbirds happy. Or so it seems today. It's not just caterpillars, earthworms and blackbirds that are having a better year. Elsewhere on the plot, aphids are booming thanks to the warm, dry weather earlier in spring, and so too are the ladybirds, hoverflies and house sparrows that eat the aphids. Bumblebees are present in reasonable numbers compared with the last couple of years, and I found my first batch of peacock butterfly caterpillars since 2023, after last year's cold, wet spring made breeding almost impossible for them. No one year is the same as the last, and there will always be seasonal variation. But climate change is causing more extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold, which few species have evolved to cope with. For now, the blackbird above the dipping tank is singing for its supper. I wish it well: may there be more blackbirds, and more earthworms, aphids and caterpillars. May there be more life. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Birdwatch: Britain's dry springs put beloved blackbird under threat
Few, if any, British garden birds are as well-known or well-loved as the blackbird. Yet a combination of warmer, drier springs and a mosquito-borne disease in the UK – both the result of the climate crisis – have put this member of the thrush family under threat. Like many other common and familiar species, blackbirds evolved in woods and forests but then learned to take advantage of the plentiful food and suitable nesting sites in urban, suburban and rural gardens. They often feed on lawns, using their powerful bill to probe for earthworms and other invertebrates beneath the surface of the soil. But the UK's warm, dry springs – 2025 was officially the sunniest since records began more than a century ago – force those creatures deeper underground and bake the soil hard, so that blackbirds cannot find the food they need for themselves and their growing chicks. And, in a double whammy, since 2020 the Usutu virus, spread by mosquitoes from Africa via continental Europe, has been detected in blackbirds in south-east England, with London's population falling by 40% in five years. If you want to help this charismatic bird, the British Trust for Ornithology is running a Blackbirds inGardens survey. Like so much of that organisation's fine work, this relies on ordinary people – citizen scientists – to provide the evidence and raw data scientists need to track the ups and downs of Britain's birds.
