Figure 1 – Red-winged blackbird, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, May 17, 2016. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

The red-winged black bird – Agelaius phoeniceus – is one of our more common birds, yet still they have a subtle understated beauty. Of course, their beauty is the only understated thing about them. They are loud demanding squawkers. When I see them in New England, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes to mind – he mentions the red-wings many times.

They also carry that great conundrum of the English language – to hyphenate or not. Why is it red-winged but  blackbird? We live today in the tyranny of spell-checker, where everything is hyphenated, correct or not. It is as if our entire lives were a parenthetical thought.

Anyway, I came across this loud fellow the other day, demanding attention and I liked the sleekness of the bird, and the contrast between red, black, and green. He also raised in my ever wandering mind the question of baking blackbirds in a pie. – from the nursery rhyme “Song of Six Pence.” Based on a reference in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night there is evidence that this poem dates back at least to 1602.

“Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,

The birds began to sing;

Wasn’t that a dainty dish,

To set before the king?”

But what of baking blackbirds into a pie? It never struck me as a situation where the blackbirds – hyphenated or not – would fare very well. Interestingly, it was a sixteenth century amusement to place live birds in a pie. Indeed, an Italian cookbook from 1549 (translated into English in 1598) contained such a recipe: “to make pies so that birds may be alive in them and flie out when it is cut up. Whether, the hapless birds left any surprises of their own is not recorded by history.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 400 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/1250th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.