The Scribble-Lark

If there had to be only one bird to represent the Wolds and the agricultural land I’ve been walking until I reached the Moors and Coast, my vote would have to go with the Yellowhammer (Emberizida citrinella).

I still haven’t got over the excitement of seeing the twisting fantails of Red Kites that have extended their territories eastward across Yorkshire and to have cycled alongside a Barn Owl hunting in the field beyond was thrilling – but it is the small yellow-topped bunting that best represents this part of the world for me.

On every walk I took through the pandemic lockdowns these little birds were always distancing down the hedgerow. Bobbing citrus heads and the characteristic song, ‘a little bit of bread with no ……. cheese‘ A sparrow-sized, seed- and bug-eater it lives with us all year long, a bird of hedgerows and farming land. Sadly, like so many farmland birds, its recent history has been one of population decline. ‘Red listed’ as a bird of conservation concern by the British Trust for Ornithology, probably a victim of a ‘hunger gap’ in late winter – deprived of food by intensive agriculture’s attempts to meet our own demands.

The female builds a cup-shaped nest from grass and moss generally close to, or directly on, the ground, laying a clutch of two to six eggs. It is the marking of the eggs that are the root of one folk-name for the bird – the random squiggles of pigment an incoherent authoring, the Scribble-Lark.

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Perhaps because of its visibility (and audibility) in the hedgerow the Yellowhammer has found its place in the output of many of the English language’s chief ‘scribblers’ – inevitably most commonly amongst those linked with the natural world.

The little bird had a significant media boost recently when the name for state planning for a ‘no deal’ Brexit was identified as ‘Operation Yellowhammer’, a codeword it felt (to me) for potential chaos and upheaval. And perhaps that was an apposite choice, as the little bird’s name is itself a witness of historic ‘culture wars’.

My reading over the HYMSfootprint walk has been a favourite poet and someone with a claim to be England’s greatest ‘walking’ writer – Edward Thomas. His life is beautifully captured in Robert McFarlane‘s 2012 book ‘The Old Ways‘ and now the same text prefaces the Penguin Classics’ Selected Poems and Prose that I am carrying. In his diary entries recording the rhythms of the natural world Thomas is punctilious in his spelling of the bird’s name – Yellow-ammer.

He’s not mistaken in dropping that ‘H’ (though I doubt the spoken Thomas ever dropped an H in his life) as the bird’s current name is a consequence of ‘folk (false) etymology’ in which a new meaning is ascribed to a ‘lost’ word. There is no hand-tool linked to this bird – but the Anglo-Saxon ‘ammer’ meaning ‘bunting’ – but as our language moved from old, to middle, to modern English (and our Scandinavian, German and French roots fought it out to form our ‘native’ tongue), some words got left behind and people tried to find a new meaning to make sense of the yellow-ammer.

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One of the names in Welsh for the bird is Gwas y Neidr – a cryptic ‘the Servant of the Snake’ (there is a less mysterious Penfelen ‘Yellow-Head’). Suggested meanings have been that the bird was thought either to warn snakes of the arrival of threats – or because snakes were thought to hatch from Yellowhammer nests. We have another scribbler’s word for at least one link between snakes and Yellowhammers. With such low-lying nests Yellowhammer young may fall prey to snakes and perhaps that underlay a perceived link between reptile and nest.

John Clare, the natural genius, poet of nature wrote at least two poems about the bird ‘With yellow breast and head of solid gold‘ – rigorous in their observation…

Its nest,

….’tis rudely planned
Of bleachèd stubbles and the withered fare
That last year’s harvest left upon the land,
Lined thinly with the horse’s sable hair.

Its eggs,

Five eggs, pen-scribbled o’er with ink their shells
Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads
As nature’s poesy and pastoral spells—

and its predators,

For snakes are known with chill and deadly coil
To watch such nests and seize the helpless young,
And like as though the plague became a guest,
Leaving a houseless home, a ruined nest—

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Clare was in part ‘marketed’ as an English successor to the ‘peasant poet’ brand often assigned to Robbie Burns. Burns also immortalised the Yellowhammer in poetry but, as quite often with his work, with some questionable unconsented sex thrown in as well.

In Scotland and Ireland the bird may be called a Yorling (perhaps from a contraction of yellow and ring). In Burn’s Yellow, Yellow Yorlin’ the poet is anxious to persuade a pretty maid that he should, despite her requests to be left alone, ‘play wi’ her yellow yellow yorlin’‘

Smut essentially, though he claims that all go away satisfied. I think sex always comes across better in song, and this version seems to have the requisite vigour….

Staying in Scotland you can find another Yellowhammer poem in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh – the catalogue entry makes clear just how ‘literal’ this poem is:

General Note: 1 box with a yellow label and black text “yellowhammer” on the lid and a yellow label with author, publisher and publication year in black on the bottom; 1 yellow hammer wrapped in tissue paper and protective filler. Box protected by transparent plastic bag.

It is one of the ‘concrete’ poems of the Scottish writer and publisher Thomas A Clark, creator of the Moschatel Press, “publishing minimal texts, visual poetry and the like in small neat booklets and postcards.” Minimal – but not insignificant – there’s value to be taken from thinking carefully about the words we use and their relationship to the world and to give ourselves space to do that.

Thomas A Clark, yellowhammer, 2017 by ewidger on Sketchfab

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Finally, two Yellowhammer poems from Thomas Hardy, one (‘The Yellow-Hammer‘) happy simply to take the bird at face value, flying down hedgerows and seizing wheat-ears by the stem:

With our funny little song,
Thus you may
Often see us flit along

In the ‘Self-Unconscious‘ the Yellowhammers are back but now metaphor-laden, accompanying a walker who is overly preoccupied with his own plans – unconscious of the world around him, of moments in the immediate that were present to be taken.

Yes, round him were these
Earth’s artistries,
But specious plans that came to his call
Did most engage
His pilgrimage,
While himself he did not see at all.

It’s a Thomas Hardy poem, so of course time passes, the birds die and the voice of the poet bitterly laments missed opportunities.

Surely this has to be the point in a blog (about a man walking) where the spirits of the artistic world are giving clear instruction to stop with the ‘specious planning’ and just look around you. Think I should do just that…

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