Common Blackbird - in Culture

In Culture

The Common Blackbird was seen as a sacred though destructive bird in Classical Greek folklore, and was said to die if it consumed pomegranate. Like many other small birds, it has in the past been trapped in rural areas at its night roosts as an easily available addition to the diet, and in medieval times the conceit of placing live birds under a pie crust just before serving may have been the origin of the familiar nursery rhyme:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie!
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The Common Blackbird's melodious, distinctive song is the theme of the poem Adlestrop by Edward Thomas;

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The song is also recalled in the Beatles track "Blackbird":

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Jake Thackray's "The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington" frequently compares the main character to a Blackbird: "For she was wild as blackbirds are and they were in a cage" or "She fed as any blackbird would, whenever hunger came".

The Common Blackbird, unlike many black creatures, is not normally seen as a symbol of bad luck, but R. S. Thomas wrote that there is "a suggestion of dark Places about it", and it symbolised resignation in the 17th century tragic play The Duchess of Malfi; an alternate connotation is vigilance, the bird's clear cry warning of danger.

The Common Blackbird is the national bird of Sweden, which has a breeding population of 1–2 million pairs, and was featured on a 30 öre Christmas postage stamp in 1970. This bird—arguably—also gives rise to the name of the region of Kosovo, which is the possessive adjectival form of kos ("blackbird") as in Kosovo Polje ("Blackbird Field").