Blackbirds illustrated here and there

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
Sing a song of sixpence,

A bag full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

There is plenty of interesting speculation as to what the blackbirds symbolize in this nursery rhyme/song from the English tradition. Most Americans learn it, or used to learn it, growing up and probably pictured the equivalent of rusty blackbirds, Brewer’s blackbirds, or even grackles flying up out of a pie. The birds that we called blackbirds in the New World are members of the family Icteridae and are related to orioles. In England, however, the blackbird is a thrush. In fact it is a thrush that looks exactly like a New World robin dipped in coal dust.

This relationship explains why Paul McCartney might rhapsodize about a “blackbird singing in the dead of night / taken these broken wings and fly away …”. Anyone who has heard a New World blackbird sing — at night or in broad daylight — knows that it would not have inspired such a romantic song. New World blackbirds rattle, creak, and make all sorts of noises that are probably only music to their fellow blackbirds.

Eurasian blackbirds (Turdus merula; the North American robin is Turdus migratorius) are common in settled areas of Europe and behave much the same as our robins. Which is to say, they hop about on lawns, build nests in your yard, and sing in your shrubbery and landscape trees. They are the same shape and size as our robins, but are a sort of matte black all over. One characteristic that they share is the bright yellow bill. You don’t notice it immediately on a robin, but it leaps out at your from the more sober appearance of the blackbird.

The color of the bill is a good way to identify what bird is being depicted in the illustrations that go with published versions of the nursery rhyme. The Wikipedia entry for “Sing a Song of Sixpence” includes a cover illustration by British artist Randolph Caldecott from 1880. The birds bills are yellow like the European blackbird, but he makes their physique a bit rangy, so that they somewhat resemble an American icterid. He makes his Old World thrush allegiance clear, however, by giving the birds a yellow eye ring, a distinct field mark of the Eurasian blackbird shared by no American icterid.

Many illustrators, of course, don’t bother to be particularly ornithological in their depict of blackbirds: a bird-shaped animal that is black is good enough for them. But in the older (19th century and early 20th century) illustrations you often find interesting depictions. For example, Frederick Richardson, an American illustrator who was active in the late 19th century, when called upon to draw blackbirds coming out of a pie, made sure to give them red epaulets, as if they were the very North American red-winged blackbird.

Just to localize the story a bit, Maxfield Parrish, late of Cornish, was called upon to illustrate many nursery rhymes including “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” In his representation of the event, the blackbirds are sitting in the pie as if they were baby birds in the nest and screeching with their mouths agape at a clearly embarrassed king. They have no clear place in anyone’s systematics of Old World or New World birds, which initially surprised me, but then I looked at is depiction of natural objects in other paintings. They are, indeed, all quite generalized and don’t really refer to any particular species, which might be part of the magic of his work.

Lest anyone be concerned about the welfare of blackbirds “baked in a pie” (regardless of whether they look like thrushes or icterids), the rhyme is actually referring to an early Modern era (16th century) parlor trick whereby live birds were placed inside a pie crust and then the ensemble was immediately brought to table. Of course, the panicked birds would quickly peck their way through the crust and explode into the room. So, they aren’t so much baked in a pie as in a baked pie. Generally, illustrators have shown the king to be either surprised or somewhat ticked off, as if this particular trick hadn’t been pulled on him before. Somewhat uniquely, Parrish’s king looks exasperated, with his hand sunk in his hand with his elbow on the table. One of the servants looks quite surprised at the turn events and another has a smirk on his face, leaving you with one guess as to who put the blackbirds in the pie.