On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me... four colley birds.
I love this picture as it was only doing my research for this project that I discovered that it was colley birds (blackbirds) not calling birds!
In my younger days I used to visit an elderly lady who had once sung in our choir. She didn't have any family close, and I worried she must be lonely. She had a budgie (whose name I forget). Let's get this out of the way, I hate budgies. My grandmother had one when we were kids and he was an evil little bird who would literally bite the hand that fed him.
This budgie the old lady kept was also an evil little bird.He could perfectly imitate the telephone and the doorbell, and his owner (a little hard of hearing) would often try and answer one or the other before it became apparent that the budgie was the culprit.
At school we kept Zebra Finches. A great tribe of them in a rather large cage. They came to stay (only the one time) for the holidays... what a racket. They were exiled to the far end of the house!
Blackbirds, whose song is absolutely beautiful, are one of the most territorial garden birds. You may have a couple (Mr and Mrs) the female being a dark brown... but if another male shows up, feathers may fly. My mother had one in her garden who didn't limit himself just to other blackbirds but pretty much any other avian that showed up! Next time you hear beautiful birdsong though, look up, you'll probably see a blackbird perched somewhere high, beak to the sky, warbling.
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Uploaded by nat_mach on August 5, 2011
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