Ah, the Bullfinch. Black-headed Bullies. Blood-Olphs. Whatever you prefer to call them, here they are, battling the winter like pint-sized gladiators. The sun, feeble and disinterested, barely filters through the foliage as I trudge back to the village along the River Leven. A few shrivelled leaves cling stubbornly to the trees, while dead Dock stalks loom like skeletal sentinels over the desolate riverbank. For these Bull Spinks, winter must be a real slog.
They look like bouncers in a nightclub: thick-necked, broad-shouldered, and ready to rumble. But appearances deceive. Pyrrhula pyrrhula—flaming red, if you fancy a Greek flourish—has the spirit of a lamb wrapped in the guise of a thug. Known as the Bully in North Yorkshire, it is the bird world’s misunderstood gentle thug. Shy seed eaters, they have only recently gathered enough nerve to visit our bird tables. Homebodies at heart, they rarely wander far from their birthplace. The Gaelic “Corcan-coille” gives us the poetic “purple bird of the woods,” while the Welsh “Coch y Berllan” calls it the “red of the orchard.” A bold splash of crimson on a branch, delivering a lacklustre call. Stunning to look at, but hardly life-of-the-party material.
Of course, beauty was no protection in the past. With their special food-storage pouches in their mouths—helpful for carrying seeds, buds, and the odd insect back to their nests—they developed a taste for fruit tree buds. This culinary quirk made them a bane for the orchard farmer and earned them a death sentence in Tudor England. Henry VIII himself decreed their fruit theft a criminal offence, and Parliament put a bounty on their heads—one penny per bird. It is a wonder they survived at all, given this state-sanctioned massacre.
Their saving grace? A song so ordinary that it went unnoticed by both predators and persecutors. Yet, irony of ironies, they can be taught to sing exquisitely. German foresters once trained Bullfinches with flutes, a quaint pastime that even spread to England. Thomas Hardy, never one to miss a bleak detail, gave Tess of the d’Urbervilles the task of whistling tunes to a caged Bullfinch after tea. A touching moment, no doubt, for a bird that survived not through its charm but through its mediocrity.
At the end of the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling and twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”
“Whistle, Ma’am?”
“Yes, whistle tunes.”
Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.
“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way.
…
She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she practised in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning. Unrestrained by the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the attentive listeners.
Those German foresters found Bullfinches so mind-numbingly easy to catch with decoys that they dubbed them “Gimpel,” meaning simple. How flattering. From there, they embarked on the noble pursuit of teaching these supposedly dim-witted creatures to sing, transforming nature’s mediocrities into musical prodigies. The town of Freiburg kept detailed records of the process, as if training birds to sing were on par with composing symphonies.1Michigan Argus, June 5, 1874 How The Bullfinch Is Taught To Sing https://aadl.org/michigan_argus_18740605
The method? Utterly humane, of course. About six birds per class, caged in a dark room, fed while music plays, until they associate sustenance with sound. When they finally muster the energy to mimic a few notes, they are rewarded with light—because nothing says “well done” like a bit of illumination. Once their spirits are sufficiently “exhilarated,” the real grind begins.
These feathered pupils are then handed over to boys whose sole purpose in life becomes serenading them with flutes from dawn till dusk. This torturous routine lasted a mere nine months, proving that neither the birds nor the boys had anything better to do. The result? A Bullfinch capable of singing something vaguely tolerable, which somehow earned it the dubious distinction of possibly inspiring Mozart’s bird catcher, Papageno, in his opera The Magic Flute.
So there you have it: the Bullfinch, a bird once mocked for its dimwittedness, now celebrated as the unlikeliest muse for high art.
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