Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Common blackbird
Turdus merula — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The blackbird singing on a rooftop in town is really a newcomer, because two hundred years ago its family lived only in shy, deep forest. Today it is one of the most common garden birds in Europe.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Zeynel Cebeci (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common blackbird live?
Home: in city parks, gardens and woodland.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 24–29 cm long. It weighs about 0.1 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
The first town blackbirds were noticed in German cities in the early nineteenth century, and from there the habit spread across Europe; other studies put the big move at the end of that same century. City life changed the birds: they start breeding earlier, many stop migrating in winter, and they sing at a higher pitch so traffic noise does not drown them out. Males are glossy black with a bright orange-yellow bill and eye-ring, while females are brown and speckled, so people often take them for a different species. A pair builds a cup of grass and mud and raises three to five blue-green eggs, often two or three times in one summer. To find earthworms a blackbird stands still, tilts its head and listens to the lawn. On average a blackbird lives about two and a half years, but the oldest ringed bird reached almost twenty-two.
Find it on the globe
Common blackbird is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why are some blackbirds brown?
Those are the females and the young birds. Only the male is black with an orange-yellow bill; the female is dark brown with a lighter, speckled throat, which hides her while she sits on the nest.
Where do blackbirds live?
Across Europe, North Africa and western Asia, and people took the bird to Australia and New Zealand as well. In Europe you find it in nearly every park and garden.
How does a blackbird find worms?
It hops, stops and tilts its head to one side. It is partly listening for movement under the grass and partly looking with one eye, because a blackbird's eyes sit on the sides of its head.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
Last checked: