Secret Toil

I spotted her yesterday with a beak full of dry grass but wasn't quick enough to get a shot. I succeeded today. She's got, rather damp, dead leaves for the nest she is building alone. He will be concentrating on his singing. I read recently that it is thought that Keats' Ode To A Nightingale was actually inspired by the singing of a thrush. I always think of Browning's wise thrush in Home Thoughts From Abroad at this time of year but today I give you John Clare's The Thrush's Nest.

"Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky."


A pair of jays was also nest-building in the Leylandii hedge. I've added a distant image to extras.