Blackbird singing in the dead of the night… – every time I sight one of these demure thrushes, more silhouettes than full profiles most of the time, that earthy earworm of a tune by the Beatles automatically starts playing in the head, albeit the bird most definitely doesn’t sing in the dead of the night… the songwriter making clear his intention of building a metaphor rather than professing love for the bird… and I definitely don’t want the darned creature to ‘fly’, as hard as it already is to discern its dark plumage within dark canopies… ‘tis an unpretentious dweller of the woods, the blackbird, quietly going about its business nibbling on insects and berries, but for the tunes it doles out, lending notes to the symphony of the forest…

‘Twas a day to rest and loiter about, recuperating from a five hundred kilometre drive the previous day and tapering for a skyrun the next… thick oak and rhododendron forests surrounded the campsite, overflowing with bird calls as the sun came up… I was initially lured to barbets singing unceasingly, exasperated by the calls and desperate to get a good but they were too deep in the woods… not wanting to climb and exert too much, I then hitched on to other bird songs… a female blackbird preening was immediately spotted but the canopy prevented a clear shot… waiting at a small meadowy patch listening to blackbirds, magpies and flycatchers, a male finally flew by but only to rest fifty meters above on a brooding oak… I just clicked a few shots hoping to salvage something during post processing, and as luck would have it, managed to do so, finally reconciling the song to a visual… one could, one muses, let the blackbird fly after all…

Musing on a Grey-winged blackbird, the woods around Bir, Himachal Pradesh