The following text is taken from a book, written by Philip Hoare, that blends memoir and travel writing. In the text, the writer contemplates some of the sights and sounds of the natural world. There could hardly be a more common bird, yet you could travel around half the world and never hear anything so beautiful as a blackbird in a suburban garden. Their big eyes sense the small slip from darkness to the semblance of light before all other garden birds; only robins can rival them in this keen awareness. I listen to the first notes of the first song, a lone voice in the dark, joined by another, then another, until they form a circle of sound. From dawn to dusk they rise and fall, fit and start, from roofs to trees, announcing their allure. Their songs are asymmetrical, apparently random; phrases are thrown out to be echoed by rivals, in the way humpback whales take up that year’s song and repeat it through the oceans. As the philosopher and musician David Rothenberg showed me, when you speed up the song of a humpback, it sounds very much like birdsong, with the same ‘sustained whistles, rhythmic chirps, and noisy brawphs’. Each sequence is its own narrative, precisely measured out. Blackbirds have the ability to sound both ridiculous and sublime at the same time, with their querying intonation ending in an upnote, like a teen’s mallspeak – duh-duh-duh?; or duh-duh-lu, duh-duh-lu! But theirs is a serious intent, bent on preventing any incursion into their fiefdom¹, as well as sounding sexy to a potential mate. They’ll fly just a few feet off the ground, to avoid predators from above – although a habit which made sense when their only enemies were raptors is less useful now that their low flight-paths take them directly into potentially lethal traffic; it amazes me, as yet another black streak almost zooms through my bike wheels, that they don’t sustain more casualties. They must retain a trace memory of when all this was only heathland. A blackbird defends its territory all its life; some may live for up to twenty years. The same bird bobs and bows and runs across my garage roof year after year, looking up at me in turn. How can such a grey, wet day be so beautiful? After days of rain I ride out at dawn, taking my chance during a brief interlude of dryness. There’s nothing to focus on, just cloud. Under such skies anything is a gain. It’s May Day. The rain intensifies the smell of the morning. The woods through which the road runs lean over and meet tree-to-tree, negating the tarmac below. At the beach, the water is flat calm. The world has opened up again. A new shape appears high over the shore; the slender wings of a swallow, zigzagging its way from the sea to the trees, thousands of miles from sub-Saharan Africa. Later, I’ll watch them from water level as they swoop within inches of my head, so close that I can see every detail: blue-black backs as iridescent as a mineral, pure white bellies and rosy chins. To the Romans, the swallow represented the household gods because it nested in the eaves²; it was unlucky to kill one. The birds’ annual disappearance was a source of mystery. Some said they flew to the moon, or even changed species. As late as the sixteenth century it was believed that they hibernated in the water, from where fishermen would cast their nets and pull out swallows, ‘huddled against each other, beak to beak, wing to wing, foot to foot ... among the reeds’. ¹fiefdom: an area or activity that is commanded by a particular person or group ²eaves: roof space