Tuesday 3 July 2007

The Blacka Singer of the World

Not to be outdone by the Cardiff Singer of the World we present the winner of our own smaller scale competition for the best songbird on Black Moor.

This year's winner is the blackcap currently to be heard on the edge of the plantation beside the scots pine and rhododendron. It is suitable for Blacka that it is a blackcap of course and also suitable that second place is awarded to a blackbird singing in the valley below the canon's path and between there and the north side of Bole Hill. Well done both of you! Our blackcap is currently singing a lot better than this one on the Knutsford Ornithological Society website.

Strong commendations for a skylark on the pasture land and for sheer energy and volume the chaffinches in the woods take some beating.

The only criteria for success are musical imagination and tonal beauty. A blackcap is always likely to come out best among preferred British songbirds. It has variety an astonishingly rich timbre and tremendous attack. I'm bemused by the description of its voice on the bird ID website as "dry rasping mix of whistles": this writer must have no music in his soul! Better is the BTO site which gives a comprehensive description and quotes the song as being

a pure rich warble with clean, musical intervals’ that was ‘less rapid, less even and less uniform than the outpourings of the Garden Warbler’.

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