One morning, I saw another black bird outside that I thought was another crow--there are a lot of them here! But when I looked more closely, I realised that it had different movements and was smaller than the crows I had seen. Its movements were more similar to the American robin at home, so I assumed that it must be in the thrush family, which is actually the family of birds that American robins belong to. But when I popped it into my Merlin app to identify it, I discovered it was a Common blackbird, also known as a Eurasian blackbird. I didn't get the best photo of it, as I couldn't get outside to photograph it more clearly before it took off, so I only snapped a couple of shots through my window, but I got a decent capture, at least enough to identify it.
What I noticed about this bird is that it looked just like the blackbirds represented in an illustration of the British nursery rhyme I had seen when I was a kid and which my mom used to sing to me all the time. Until I developed a more serious birding hobby, I would see black looking birds all the time and wonder if these were blackbirds. I could always identify the crows, but other birds I saw, I wasn't sure about. But it turned out that while we do have blackbirds at home, we don't have these blackbirds, the ones that I knew from the nursery rhyme. As a result, seeing this bird gives me sweet nostalgic memories of my mom tucking me into bed as a little girl, and instead of, or sometimes in addition to, a bedtime story, I'd ask for her to sing this song to me.
On a recent walk, a couple of months after I made this initial post, I got a good photo of a female blackbird. She's brown all over!
December 27, 2020: I'm happy to say that I was able to get additional photos of a better quality of the blackbird at St James's Park on this day. The light was good for photos, even for black animals--which, if you're into animal photography of any kind, including your own pets, you'll know that it's not easy to get a photo that really shows off the animal properly. Anyway, I was able to get a good photo of the male. I should mention that I finally put 2 and 2 together. I mentioned when I first posted about the blackbird that it had movements similar to the American robins we have at home. Only recently did I confirm the Latin names, one after the other, to see that they are both from the genus turdus. No wonder they seem so similar! Even the way they sing is somewhat similar, though I would never mistake one for the other. This might be less exciting for me if I had seen and/or heard other thrushes at home, since we do have 2 other thrushes in Alberta, but now that I know the blackbird is related to American robin, it really eases my mind because I couldn't stop thinking about how uncanny their similarities were. Just now, I even decided to look up the word turdus, and sure enough, it means "thrush" in English. Good grief! I'm usually more on the ball than that!
June 14, 2022. In addition to the photos above, I was able to get a couple of shots that actually even looked shiny. This beauty was glistening in the sun! I posted one above so that the thumbnail has a better quality photo when people are going through the list of birds on my blog, and here below is another one.
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