Several ways of looking at a thrush #
Prologue #
The story starts with the photo I took last week. When I saw many birds feeding on the dewy lawn, I walked past the Denny Yard with my camera at around 10 am. The sky was overcast, and the shutter speed couldn’t be high. Although I took dozens of shots, it’s hard to find clear pictures. Of the dozens, I picked out only this one with cropped and added extra clarity.
I like it. Dewdrops are soft, as with a diffusion camera filter.
There’s a question, what kind of bird is it?
After asking an “ornithologist” in life, she told me it was a wood thrush (i.e., Hylocichla mustelina/棕林鸫), which belongs to the thrush family, Turdidae, as the common blackbird (Turdus merula).
I knew that there were no crows in Shanghai, only common blackbirds. If you see a black bird in Shanghai someday, you can almost be sure that it is a common blackbird. Once, I played tennis, and the tennis ball was knocked into the sky as a common blackbird passed by. Perhaps it carried the tennis ball away. Although the blackbird often appears around me ( in the trees in the apartment complex across the street), I have never gotten a good look at it.
When I searched for wood thrush, the nearest associated term was the song thrush(Turdus philomelos), a lucid name. It’s a singing thrush. When I looked up its Chinese name, I was surprised: 欧歌鸫. (which means sing thrush in Europe).
The Song Thrush #
The song thrush (Turdus philomelos) is a species of bird in the thrush family (Turdidae). It is a migratory bird found in Europe, Asia, and northwestern Africa. They are about 25 cm (10 in) in length and have brown upperparts, creamy white underparts with black spotting, and a reddish-brown tail. They are known for their beautiful and melodious songs, which often consist of repeating phrases and mimic other bird species.
Frequently mentioned in its introduction: it is written into poems by many poets and is a familiar image in poetry.
For example, The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth:
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy:
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
And, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad by Robert Browning:
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d peartree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters n the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
–Far brighter than this gaudy milon-flower!
The Chinese Hwamei #
Like the translation of this Browning poem, I’ve noticed that the thrush is often directly translated as a painted thrush. But the painted bush and the thrush are not the same kinds of birds. I couldn’t find any explanation even after searching for a long time. However, I have a guess: the painted eyebrow and the song thrush are similar in appearance, and they are both birds that are good at singing, often kept by people for enjoyment, and are also imager in poems. Thus, two birds straddling the Eurasian continent have been combined into one through the translation.
The Chinese Hwamei, 画眉/ Garrulax canorus, is a famous traditional Chinese cage bird, highly respected by bird breeders. The English name, Hwamei, comes from the word huà-méi, which means “painted eyebrows” and refers to the distinctive markings around the bird’s eyes.
The Chinese Hwamei by OUYANG Xiu
百啭千声随意移，
山花红紫树高低。
始知锁向金笼听，
不及林间自在啼。
Hundred chirps and thousand twitters and movement at will,
Mountain flowers red and purple, trees high and low.
Just learned what it sounds like to be locked in a golden cage,
A far cry from the unrestrained warbling in the woods.
The Hermit Thrush #
As the name implies, the Hermit Thrush (隐夜鸫/Catharus obscurus) is a nocturnal thrush known for its activity in dark environments and sensitive voice.
Walt Whitman wrote in When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
The Common Blackbird #
The last one I would like to introduce, The Common Blackbird (乌鸫/Turdus merula) that I mentioned long ago, belongs to the thrush family and is native to Europe, Asia and North Africa. They are about 25 cm in length and can be identified by their glossy black plumage and red eyes. The blackbird is also known for its adaptability and can be seen in many urban areas, where they use gardens and parks as food sources.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. (It is doubtful whether the black bird in this poem refers to the common blackbird.)
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Afterword #
Whether it’s the wood thrush, the song thrush, the hermit thrush, the common blackbird, or the Chinese hwamei. These forest creatures that live with humans are always on the minds of humans, no matter where they live.
There are countless ways to observe birds, and I record them by poems.