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Bird of passage
by David Hill
Once lauded in poetry, the thrush has become the terrorist of suburbia.
First, there was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, whereby years of English Stage I students learnt that poetry didn’t have to go dum-de-dum. Instead, it could go dum-er-eh?
Then there were Eliot’s own Notes to The Waste Land, wherein TS courteously made it even more incomprehensible (lines 366-76: “cf Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: Schon ist halb Europa …”). Thanks a bunch, Tom baby.
And then came Notes on the Notes to … wherewith critics annotated every line of the poem in increasingly minute detail till they vanished up their own obscurities.
I digress. Let me direct you to line 357 of The WL. It reads “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop”, thus confirming a lot of Eng Stage 1’s suspicions about 20th-century verse.
Big Tom’s own Note to line 357 begins “This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush, which …” Turdus: them Latins had a sense of humour all right.
And a sense of the appropriate. The thrushes in our street aren’t hermits; they operate in SWAT teams. Their behaviour often brings my classical education ringing over the fences, as I cry, “Oh … turdus!”
Introduced from Europe in the 19th century, along with rugby – another national disaster – thrushes have become terrorists of suburbia.
Supposedly they’re a boon, “feeding mostly on snails and slugs”. Actually, ours prefer infant bean and pea tips. When they do go for slithery things, they either use our roof to belt hell out of the shells at 5.27am or they rake a cubic metre of garden onto the path as they search for tiffin. Hitler’s army retreating through Finland must have passed on a thing or four to the thrushes advancing across my seed beds.
Then there’s another of Turdus’ maddening habits: the mindless call usually rendered by bird books as “tchick, tchick, tchick!” In English, this translates as “nyah, nyah, nyah!”, and is most frequently heard as the spotted sods lift off from a scraped garden or streaked roof.
“That’s the wise thrush,” maundered Robert Browning. “He sings each song twice over/Lest you should think he never could recapture/That first fine careless rapture.” Rubbish, Robbie. S/he sings it twice, usually at 5.27am and 5.28 am, because: (a) s/he’s innumerate; (b) s/he’s sadistic.
I digress again – to poetry, which started this whole thing. Browning was also responsible for “The lark’s on the wing,/The snail’s on the thorn”, etc. What’s not generally known is that his next couplet originally read “The thrush’s on the roof,/Why was I ever born?” Don’t believe me, then.
Our resident Turdii obviously cross-bred with a Stuka some time in the past (see Hitler ref previously). Their dive-bombing skills and pinpoint delivery are evidenced on the car roof, doors and windows and on our garden paths, porch windows and sun hats.
At 11.39am on Mondays, a minute before I head out to get the L*st*n*r from the l*tt*r b*x, at least four of them assemble on the power lines directly above the said repository. Another original script you didn’t know about was Hitchcock’s The Birds, which planned to use thrushes instead of crows for that scary playground build-up. His crew refused; they were too frightened.
But I’m not a vindictive man, except at 5.27am. For some time, I’d been distressed by the number of spotted dicks that kept flying into the glass walls of our porch (I’d told Beth it was a bad idea to clean them) and thudding to the ground. She didn’t like my suggestion of a snarling moggy painted on the glass, so we settled for curtains.
In spite of which, a thick tchick whammed into the glass one afternoon and then hit the concrete. I rushed out to succour it, and, of course, it began flapping all over the place, voiding unnecessary body weight as it did so.
Skidding on Turdus turds, I lifted the idiot import to safety on top of our trellis. It sat there for a bit, then whirred off in a heart-stopping arc, skimming and soaring above hedge and bough into the freedom of the firmament.
As it went, it crapped on the washing.
