The male red-winged blackbirds, I mean.
I heard my first loud
“konk-a-ree” of the year on March 9 while on a walk around Col. Sam
Smith Park with the Toronto Field Naturalists. The bird’s nasal call
gave everyone a lift, for the red-wing is one of the earliest avian
migrants to return each year, making it a convincing, reassuring sign of
spring (this month’s blustery, unpredictable weather notwithstanding).
Right now, only a few males of the species Agelaius phoeniceus
have arrived. These are the intrepid, advance reconnaissance troops,
checking out the conditions for courting and mating in their summer
territories.
Over the next couple
of weeks or so, more males will trickle in to stake out their land
claims. Then, in a few more weeks, there will be a huge invasion as the
females return en masse from their wintering grounds down south, to
select a mate and set up housekeeping.
The predictable return
of the red-wing has inspired paeans for more than a century. Consider,
for example, British poet William Ernest Henley’s 1876 ode (which,
curiously, lacks a title) to this most common of birds:
The nightingale has a lyre of gold,
The lark’s is a clarion call,
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,
But I love him best of all.
For his song is all of the joy of life,
And we in the mad, spring weather,
We two have listened till he sang
Our hearts and lips together.
A few years after
Henley wrote his endearing poem, Frank M. Chapman, a curator at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, wrote of the lowly
blackbird thusly in his seminal 1897 work, Bird-Life — A Guide to the Study of Our Common Birds:
“But when early in
March the Redwings come, then we know that the tide of the year has
turned. With perennial faith in the season they come in flocks of
hundreds, singing their springtime chorus with a spirit that March winds
can not subdue.”
Bird-Life, with enchanting drawings by Toronto-raised Ernest Thompson Seton, can be read online at
http://archive.org/stream/birdlifeguidetos00chapman#page/n9/mode/2up .
Chapman’s reference to
red-wings arriving in “flocks of hundreds” gives a clue to this noisy
bird’s scientific name. Its genus name, Agelaius, is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning “belonging to a large group” and its species name, phoeniceus, is from the Greek for purple-red.
The latter designation
refers to the bright red epaulettes males wear on their shoulders.
Female red-winged blackbirds do not have red on their wings and, in
fact, are not even black. Throughout the year the gals look like
streaky, brown, oversized sparrows.
I, for one, am
delighted to have our first red-wings back. But Chapman, the American
curator and ornithologist, had a particularly fine way of expressing the
magic he felt in the red-wings’ return. Here is a passage he wrote in
1912:
“A swiftly moving,
compact band of silent birds, passing low through the brown orchard,
suddenly wheels, and, alighting among the bare branches, with the
precision of a trained choir breaks into a wild, tinkling glee. It is
quite possible that in the summer this rude chorus might fail to attract
enthusiasm, but in the spring it is as welcome and inspiring a promise
of the new year as the peeping of frogs or the blooming of the first
wild flower.”
