A robin red breast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage wrote Blake. A Belfast friend was reminiscing about the songbirds in cage that used to be so common outside the houses in the industrial quarters of the city. Was it the same in Dublin? Well, Dublin certainly had its bird market and, coincidence, a few days after the conversation, up came a copy of AE's The Irish Statesman for September 1927 containing an article on the same bird market. It was in a yard off Wood Street then. Apart from the canaries, there were a large number of larks; goldfinches and linnets, some bull finches, and a thrush and a blackbird. Now and then a lark would burst into song "as if it felt the confined yard was too small for the full volume of its song that may have filled Gleninagh from the lake shore to the peak of Bencullaghmore." And a linnet sang its full repertoire. A man stepped forward. "Three shillings" he said, and got it. "I don't need the cage."
Then the climax. The owner took a lark out of a cord cage and let it rest on his open palm. "The lark made no attempt to escape. Then it began to sing. It sang a long, well sustained song with all the voice and quality of early summer. The head was tilted upwards, the little throat pulsated and throbbed with every note. The bird, it was plain, had forgotten its enslavement and sang joyously the song learned in freedom ... when the lark stopped singing the dealer placed it on the ground where it sang again as before.
A man in the group was anxious If it's high money you want, I'll give you five pounds for the lark." The dealer shook his head and moved away. Then a voice in the crowd explained that that was the catcher lark, the decoy. Said the man who had tried to buy: "I knew it. I knew it. He's a bonny bird and if I could buy him, there's be an end to the catchin' of wild larks for a while."
Nearly seventy years ago. Today people feed birds in their gardens or yard and welcome them - outside. Two friends comparing notes - one in Meath, where he reported long tailed tits, blue tits, coal tits and great tits, all at his feeding devices at the one time. In Dublin, the other could only tell about the disappearance, since the first cold period, of the tits and other garden birds, apart from a couple of blackbirds and thrushes, and a robin or two.