As I opened the gate to my daughter-in-law’s brother’s house in the centre of Hobart a male blackbird flew up from the garden plants and perched on the wall. It was a very smart black male with a brilliant yellow bill; but what was it doing on the island of Tasmania?
Next morning it was singing beautifully from the top of the house next door. The mellow song took me straight back to our house in northern Scotland where a pair of blackbirds have their home in spring. In winter, our garden is graced by three or four Norwegian blackbirds that have migrated down from the cold for the winter – they arrive in the first days of November and the young males are so obvious with their black rather than yellow bills. They fight for garden scraps on the lawn and then in March they fly north for their summer in Scandinavia, just as our local blackbirds return from their winter quarters further south in the UK.
I was in Tasmania for a week’s holiday with my son and his family who live in Sydney, but that first morning having a breakfast in the sun was the real surprise. The female blackbird flew into the trees at the back of the garden, and at the same time a noisy family of European starlings flew over. There were three house sparrows on the roof of the house next door and in the distance I heard a goldfinch singing and then a greenfinch called. The only Australian birds I saw, as we ate breakfast, were three spotted doves and an occasional silver gull flying over.
We explored Mount Wellington, with its beautiful panoramic views of Hobart and then a day trip out on to Bruny Island. There I saw a range local birds from black oystercatchers to white-bellied sea eagles, as well as wallabies and echidnas. This was the Australia I expected on a winter visit to my older son and his family; enjoying their summer was a lovely break for me from snowy November at home.
Whenever we visited a small town or village on our journey around Tasmania I would see and hear blackbirds, they were commoner than at home. We stayed a night at a lovely house overlooking the most beautiful bay with white sandy beaches looking east over the ocean. The garden wall between the properties were where two blackbird territories met. When the male next door was looking for worms on the grass next door, the resident male seemed to know it was already there without looking. It would fly up onto the wall and that was enough to chase away the trespasser.
I looked up blackbird on my laptop for information and very quickly found plenty of references to ‘common blackbird’. That’s the official name, nowadays, back home in Scotland but I never use it, I’ve always used just blackbird and always will. But here in Tasmania somehow common blackbird seemed to be the appropriate name, for a species which shouldn’t be here.
Blackbirds were taken to Melbourne by the early British settlers in the 1850s, allegedly so they could still hear the lovely song they knew well back home. A melodious reminder of the lives they had left behind. These early travellers frequently took wildlife and plants by boat to the new worlds that they colonised. In Australia maybe the introduced blackbirds weren’t too bad, but the rabbits, red foxes and domestic cats were soon destroying the incredible Australian natural treasures, and still are in many places.
When I was living in northern Scotland in the early 1960s, I used to help an old man with his wintering sheep and after getting them into the field would follow him into his croft house and sit by the open fire. His younger sister would soon come through with cups of tea and freshly baked scones, while Jim would regale me with stories about his young days shepherding in New Zealand. He told me about the naturalisation society which he assisted. Before leaving on the long passage back to New Zealand they would take on board the boat, birds, animals and plants which they thought would do well in their new home. Even when they stopped for a few days in Cape Town they would catch anything they could for release at journey’s end. I guess the feeding and looking after the fellow travellers would have kept them busy on monotonous journeys.
I’ve just checked and found that early in 1857, a bird dealer named Brown, trading between London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Valparaiso, had arrived in Melbourne with blackbirds, thrushes, skylarks, starlings, goldfinches, robins, woodlarks, chaffinches, and nightingales. He had not lost one bird by death, but one blackbird had escaped from a cage and flown out to sea. The six nightingales were purchased at a cost of £4 to £5 each – so it was big business.
So, the common blackbirds were brought to Australia, with the aid and encouragement of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, but not for bringing economically useful animals and plants to the colonies – but for the simple reason that the English missed their singing blackbirds. That was a different era throughout the world and why nowadays we have so many problems with what we call alien exotics, even in our own country.
The species was originally confined to Melbourne and Adelaide; but it crossed the Bass Strait to Tasmania and is now found throughout south-eastern Australia, both on the coast and inland, even as far north as southern Queensland. Despite its lovely song, it is regarded as a pest in orchards, vineyards, market gardens and backyard vegetable patches because it damages soft fruits, including figs, grapes, olives, berries and stone fruit. I concur there, because our blackbirds always get the cherries in our back garden before us.
