Home Birds

We're very lucky to have a number of song thrushes living on our property as they are in decline. I loved it when one decided to use my urn makeshift bird table as an anvil. It was good sport trying to capture one deep in a hedge using the camera's eye detection feature.

Browning's Home Thoughts From Abroad always runs through my mind at this time of year when the air is full of birdsong. I was interested to read the SparkNotes on it. Though he longs for home, he doesn’t miss it enough to live there. The domestic bliss and rapturous exchange with nature that characterize many Romantic poems emerge here as the constructions of people who do not live the life about which they write. I think he's incorrect about the thrush singing each song twice over. I'd say thrice or more. 

Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England - now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows -
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray’s edge -
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!