It’s been a good year for gorse. Perhaps the dryish winter helped. All across the north of England I’ve seen the plant’s reckless spatters of chromium yellow bristling with the promise of stonechats and whitethroats.
Some trace the origins of the word gorse to an Anglo-Saxon word for wasteland (this, Ulex europaeus, is a species of poor soil and open skies) but others relate it ultimately to the Greek for hedgehog, which is much more satisfying.
The naturalist WH Hudson wrote with distaste about the “yellow smell” of various wildflowers: tansy, fleabane, ragwort, pepper saxifrage (“the worst of the lot”). Gorse doesn’t belong in this company. Its pea-like flowers give off a coconutty whiff.
More fierce yellow-gold – and more bristling, more spikiness – has been on display among the local goldfinches. I think it’s been a good year for them, too, in our neighbourhood.
Too often I’ve thought of goldfinches as delicate birds, dainty, ornaments of the thistle beds and teazel tops (Carduelis carduelis means thistle finch). We speak of them, rather preciously, as gathering in charms.
I’m more likely to think of them now as ragged war-bands, roaming the suburbs and edgelands. This spring their songs have seemed louder and more martial than ever; those smart golden wing-bars look like sergeant’s stripes.
Golfinches are fierce but not disciplined. The song, for instance, is a wild thing: it sounds like a supercut or mashup of a chaffinch’s more orderly trill.
The bird’s slight body tapers to a devilish point. The bill, adapted for winkling seeds from flowerheads, is sharp tipped, and close up the goldfinch’s face, dipped in scarlet warpaint, has a mean expression (compare the bullfinch, beefily built but with the mildest countenance).
By the standards of small birds goldfinches aren’t desperately territorial, but they always seem to find something to fall out about.
They jockey and bicker on the power lines. Obscure quarrels of power and priority are played out in the deeps of the laburnum (more blazing gold). The metallic chinking of the war-band’s internal dialogues is constant.
And those songs ring out over and over. More than once, absent-minded and cloth-eared, I’ve mistaken them for wren song, so noisy and disproportionate, so blisteringly, ringingly indignant.
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