I had become so used to hearing Blackbirds singing each evening that I was taken aback when one evening in late June, their song had stopped abruptly, and I knew they would not be singing again until next spring.

They have fared well in our modern gardens with the abundance of worms beneath the closely mown lawns and shrub borders for nest sites. Their first brood is reared early in spring, followed by a second, and sometimes a third if the first fails or there are still worms to be found. I saw a male carrying food for its chicks on July 12th. When the soil dries out, the worms go deeper and the birds change to eat the early crop of berries, in my garden it is Mahonia and redcurrants.

By August most birds have disappeared altogether, spending the high summer in woodland, searching for food in leaf litter. They stay there while they moult, returning to the garden in autumn. Winter is not usually a problem for them, there is a good supply of berries and worms, even enough for the extra Blackbirds that will join them from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The highest mortality for Blackbirds is during a hot August when food is difficult to find.

The Song Thrush has one advantage when worms are difficult to find, it can feed on snails. They smash the snails open by hitting them on a favourite hard surface or stone, hence an alternative name for it was the Anvil Bird.

Thrushes are shy and will not linger long in gardens unless the garden is very large, preferring open wooded farmland with hedges instead. Their nervousness may be because they are a favourite prey of the Sparrow Hawk. It is a species in decline with numbers reduced by 54 per cent between 1970 and the present. There are ten times more Blackbirds than Song Thrushes. However, this was not always the case, up to the early 1900s, the Song Thrush was the commoner of the two. The Blackbird is maintaining its numbers at present, although even for them there has been a worrying decline in South East England because of losses due to the virus Usutu which is spread by mosquitoes. It was first detected in 2020 in London and is spreading.

The Blackbird song is pleasantly melodic and has a soothing rhythm, whereas the Thrush song is more lively with unexpected notes. Thrush is derived from the word thrice or three times because a feature of its song is that it has repeated notes or phrases. Robert Browning wrote “That`s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think that he never could recapture, the first fine careless rapture”. The Thrush is often the first bird to sing in spring even in January, and will be the last to sing in autumn. In 2023 I heard a Thrush singing on the 27th November. Also it is likely to be the first to sing at dawn and the last to sing at night.

I can remember a sullen spring day this year, sitting outside feeling low, when first one and then another Blackbird sang, with a solitary Thrush singing in the distance. As is the habit of the Thrush, it moved from tree to tree getting closer, and as each Blackbird removed itself from the chorus, only the Thrush was left on a tree very near, then it also stopped and abruptly flew off. My mood had changed, uplifted by the songsters, the Thrush in particular.

Thomas Hardy wrote, in his poem, The Darkling Thrush, “That I could think there trembled through, His happy good night air. Some Blessed Hope, whereof he knew, And I was unaware.” I might add the words of Hippocrates “Nature is the best doctor.”