Easter 2007 — Eggs & Birds

This is a chaffinch’s egg. For many people this is a familiar and attractive garden bird. The male with his smart blue-grey and rusty-pink plumage is easily identified.The chaffinch is the UK’s second commonest breeding bird (the wren is the commonest).

You’ll usually hear chaffinches before you see them. Males typically sing two or three different song types, and there are regional dialects too. Up until the nineteenth chaffinch singing contests were a regular feature of working class life in Britain. Birds with names like ‘Kingsland Roarer’ and ‘Shoreditch Bobby’ were pitted against each other in the back room of pubs. Each time they uttered their call a chalk mark was made and at the end of the alloted time the number of marks was totted up and the bird with the most won the prize. Sometimes birds were blinded in the belief that it made them better singers. Chaffinch singing contests are still held in Belgium (called Vinkenzetting, from the Dutch for finch-sitting), although birds are no longer ever blinded. In England traping finches was outlawed in 1896.

Thomas Hardy, like many others, was outraged by the cruelty than humans practised on this bird in the belief that it would produce beautiful song. He wrote an impassioned poem, ‘The Blinded Bird’, which is filed with biblical language and in which the chaffinch’s sufferings are likened to those of Christ:

Resenting not such wrong,
Thy grievous pain forgot,
Eternal dark thy lot,
Groping thy whole life long;
After that stab of fire;
Enjailed in pitiless wire;
Resenting not such wrong!

Who hath charity? This bird.
Who suffereth long and is kind,
Is not provoked, though blind
And alive ensepulchred?
Who hopeth, endureth all things?
Who thinketh no evil, but sings?
Who is divine? This bird.