I’m beautiful, but don’t tell anyone. My song is sweet but please don’t listen to it. These are the principles that guide the life of a male bullfinch: the gaudiest garden bird of them all. Or he would be if you could see him.

There are bullfinches in our garden in Norfolk. They have a special fondness for ash keys and there’s a splendid ash at the bottom. They must be there or thereabouts most of the time: but I hardly ever see them. Or hear them.

This is spring and the place was echoing with song this morning. I could hear great tit, song thrush and greenfinch as I walked towards the hut I work in: there’s a clump of bushes in front of it and the ash tree just behind.

And then the soft, complex and subtly lovely song of bullfinch. Just a few whispering bars. I hear it so seldom I paused for a second before the penny dropped. Of course! Singing from cover as usual: a female bullfinch would have to very close to hear this gentle come-hither. She’d have to be near-as-damn-it hither already.

The male is flashier than any robin, with his pink-red breast, but it’s not in his nature to flaunt it. His beauty is secret, his song only a fraction less so.

Spring is an oratorio and it welcomes one singer after the next. Here is a welcome addition to the chorus: a moment’s inattention and you miss it. My new book about spring has plenty of birdsong in it – but no bullfinch. Perhaps I missed a trick. Another brief verse: an almost self-effacing self-advertisement.

Was there a touch of reproach in his song?

 

• https://www.waterstones.com/book/spring-is-the-oly-season/simon-barnes/9781526667373
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=spring+is+the+only+season&crid=1EXD0RH5D5U2A&sprefix=spring+is+the+only+season%2Caps%2C216&ref=nb_sb_noss_1