An Evening Concert

Every evening from early March to late September, around an hour before sunset, I open my office window. Not to let in the cool fresh air - although that is a bonus in a stuffy old Victorian terrace - but because I know that the concert will soon begin. I usually miss the beginning, distracted as I am by emails and social media, only consciously realising the first act has started once it’s well and truly underway. You can’t miss it, although somehow, for years, I did. Between rushing back from work and making dinner, planning for the future and meeting up with friends, the concert had been going on for centuries - millennia, even - before I really listened.

The singer isn’t your usual prima donna, being jet black, feathered and roughly 25 centimetres from beak to tail. His beady, orange-rimmed eye surveys his kingdom as he raises his voice to the sky and releases trills, runs and vibrato to an audience he cannot see. Until I started noticing his presence, I had no idea that birds could be such creatures of habit. His sense of timing is immaculate and unchanging, as is his placement towards the top of my neighbour’s yew tree. The first few times I doubted that it could be the same bird, but after years of consistent attendance I have to concede that unless the local birds have instituted a rota system without my knowledge, this is my same blackbird. 

The years have made him confident, and his piercing call sometimes drowns out the noise of Zoom call and television alike. My rational brain knows that he is singing to ward off other birds, or possibly to find a mate - I have seen a lady blackbird hanging around lately - but on a late summer evening when the sun melts into the horizon over the Peak District, sending an orange glow across the skies that rivals even the colour of his beautiful eye rings, it seems like he is singing for the pure joy of being alive in a place like this. On a day like this.