Why the blackbird got its name when crows and ravens are black too
England has plenty of black birds, from crows and rooks to ravens and jackdaws, so why did one thrush claim the name blackbird, first written down in 1486? In older English, bird meant a small or young one; the big black species were called fowl. Among the little ones, only this thrush was black and everywhere.
Before that name settled in, the species was often called the ouzel, from an Old English word related to the German Amsel. Shakespeare's Bottom sings about a black ouzel cock with an orange-tawny bill in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the term survives in the ring ouzel, a close relative. Carl Linnaeus gave the bird its scientific name, Turdus merula, in 1758; both words are Latin, one for thrush and one for blackbird, and merula lives on in the French merle.
The description fits only the male: glossy black with a yellow eye-ring and an orange-yellow bill that darkens a little in winter. Females are sooty brown with a faintly mottled breast, and youngsters look like females with pale spots. Adults of the widespread European race measure roughly 23.5 to 29 centimetres and weigh 80 to 125 grams. They eat insects, earthworms, berries and fruit, and build tidy cup nests cemented with mud in woods and gardens.
Its ancestry took an island route. Unlike the song and mistle thrushes, which spread north from Africa directly, the blackbird's forebears colonised the Canary Islands first and reached Europe from there. Today it breeds from Iceland to the Urals and across North Africa and parts of Asia, and it has been introduced to Australia and New Zealand. Some populations stay put while northern ones migrate, and urban males are more willing than country ones to sit out a cold winter, helped by warmer city air and plentiful food that let them claim territory and breed earlier.
In the Americas, birds called blackbirds, such as the red-winged blackbird, belong to an unrelated family closer to tanagers and New World warblers, which is why North Americans often say Eurasian blackbird for the original.
Source: Common blackbird
