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Updated: June 13, 2025
40. BLACKCAP. Sylvia atricapilla, Linnaeus. French, "Fauvette
Even when a male Blackcap is engaged in incubation, it will leave its nest on the approach of a Chiffchaff, and, having driven away the intruder, proceed to sing excitedly. At other times both male and female will combine to attack this small intruder.
All the Warblers are exceedingly pugnacious, the fighting being especially severe between those that are very closely related. The Blackcap and the Garden-Warbler are constant rivals, and the scenes which can be witnessed when the two meet in competition are interesting from many points of view.
Down in the sedges by the lake a blackcap sang sweetly, waesomely, the nightingale of Scotland. Far on the moors a curlew cried out that its soul was lost. Nameless things whinnied in the mist-filled hollows. On the low grounds there lay a white mist knee-deep, and Ralph Peden waded in it as in a shallow sea. So in due time he came near to the place of his tryst. Never had he stood so before.
At one end of the garden were several rows of blackcap raspberry bushes, which had grown into an awful snarl. The old canes that had borne fruit the previous season were still standing, ragged and unsightly; the new stalks that would bear the coming season sprawled in every direction; and I had found that many tips of the branches had grown fast in the ground.
Thus the males of our migratory birds generally arrive at their places of breeding before the females, so that many males are ready to contend for each female. I am informed by Mr. Jenner Weir, that the bird-catchers assert that this is invariably the case with the nightingale and blackcap, and with respect to the latter he can himself confirm the statement. Mr.
By-and-by she got up and went to the window, and stood looking out. "I never saw a lovelier landscape," she said, musingly. "With the grey hills, and the snow-peaks, and the brilliant sky, with the golden light and the purple shadows, and the cypresses and olives, with the river gleaming below there amongst the peach-blossoms, and isn't that a blackcap singing in the mimosa?
It is not yet noon, these songs have been ceaseless since dawn; this evening, after the yellowhammer has sung the sun down, when the moon rises and the faint stars appear, still the cuckoo will call, and the grasshopper lark, the landrail's "crake, crake" will echo from the mound, a warbler or a blackcap will utter his notes, and even at the darkest of the summer night the swallows will hardly sleep in their nests.
The Blackcap is mentioned by Professor Ansted in his list, and restricted to Guernsey. There is only one specimen a female at present in the Museum. WILLOW WREN. Phylloscopus trochilus, Linnaeus. French, "Bee-fin Pouillat." The Willow Wren is a tolerably numerous summer visitant, I believe, to all the Islands, though I have only seen it myself in Guernsey and Sark.
The blackcap has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any human words.
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