All through the sudden downpour the last survivor of the last brood of summer looked out from the dry recesses of a rosemary bush. The baby blackbird wore a pitiable frown, the downturned corners of its mouth enough to draw out all my paternal instincts. It rocked forward, raising little triangular appendages on its back that could barely pass for wings. Devoid of tail feathers, its rear end looked as if it had been involved in a shunt.
Only two days before, this spotty blackbird, still flecked with down, had been crammed against its siblings in the nest, patchily feathered, eyes newly open. Its single parent was returning with a beakful of food every three or four minutes, hour after hour.
The chorus that habitually greeted her arrival developed from the thin cheeps of the recently hatched, which I could imitate with a soft pursed-lips whistle, to loud ventriloquial bleats. When she flew I could just about see through the leaves and into the nest from where I sat. Another week, I thought.
But the crèche had become a crush and it overflowed one evening as the first baby spilled out. Did it fall or was it pushed? Its fellows parachuted down at dawn, flightless, helpless, wholly dependent on their mother. One sat in the open, apparently failing to grasp that its first priority was concealment.
Forty-eight hours later, three begging bleats had subsided to one. The female sought her sole chick and landed on the next perch, brandishing a hunk of bread that was three times the size of her own beak. Here was a trial with the emphasis on error. She tried thrusting it into her offspring’s open gape. She tried this battering ram approach several times before eventually giving up.
Minutes later, she was back with a beak full of wriggling “spaghetti”. Her wide-mouthed baby whirred its winglets, and gulped down its meal. It felt like a little triumph for the final fledgling of a three-brood summer. Thousands have shared my experience, raptly following their garden blackbirds’ multiple cycles from egg to flight.
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