#Jenny wren bird full#

The guitar is tuned down a whole step for the song, providing a unique sound that reflects McCartney's earlier works.ДЄ wren is one of my favorite birds, little English bird, itвЂ™s the smallest English bird and I always feel very privileged to see a wren because theyвЂ™re very shy and itвЂ™s just, Ah! So a combination of all of that. The solo is played on an Armenian woodwind instrument, called duduk-a first in pop music history-played by Venezuelan-born world winds specialist and multi-instrumentalist Pedro Eustache. The song earned a nomination for the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance category. McCartney wrote the tune in the same sort of finger picking style found in ' Blackbird', ' Mother Nature's Son' ( The Beatles) and ' Calico Skies' ( Flaming Pie). It also refers to a bird known as the wren, which is reported to be McCartney's favourite. I grabbed this shot on a recent tour of the Northern Isles.'Jenny Wren' was written in Los Angeles, and is about a character of the same name from Charles Dickens' 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend. The Shetland wren in the picture is a sub-species of the Eurasian wren.

You can hear a wren singing on the RSPB website: The Wren. Song thrushes were once called Mavis, although nobody seems to know why.В Jay, incidentally, is said to be an Anglicised form of the Roman name Gaius - proof, were it needed, that we Brits have been giving birds first names for a very long time indeed.ДЄnd finally, a country name for a wren was 'Stumpy Toddy'. We Brits used to have a habit of giving birds first names - hence Martin, Robin, Tom Tit, Jack Snipe,В Jackdaw and Magpie (where Mag is short for Margaret). Once Jenny had recovered, she got rid of him. Jenny was an independent lady, though, and Robin's amorous efforts were in vain. She takes a starring role in an old nursery rhyme: You may have heard this bird called 'Jenny Wren', a soubriquet that goes back to medieval times. Since they only live for two years on average, there must have been an awful lot of them since then. They were recorded by the Anglo-Saxons and there is fossil evidence that they were around during the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago. Wrens have been singing and building nests for a long time too. Not bad for a tiny bird that weighs about as much as a pound coin: in Britain, only the goldcrest and firecrest are smaller. And then male wrens have to defend their territories against other males all year round so hardly a month passes in which you can't hear the wren's body-shaking song - per unit weight, it's ten times louder than a crowing cockerel. The female insists that the male builds up to half a dozen, even eight, nests before she chooses one in which to lay her eggs. It's pretty tough being a male wren though. They were, for a while, King of the Bands in the swinging sixties.) (Yes, the band that originally recorded Love is All Around and Wild Thing,В The Troggs, were originally named The Troglodytes. One of the reasons, the wren population in the UK is so huge is that they're happy to live pretty much anywhere - mixed deciduous forests, moors, gardens, farmland and in the winter even reed beds, it's all the same to the trogs. Long ago, it was decided in the avian court that the king's crown would go to the bird that could fly highest.В The eagle was well on its way to victory and exhausted, when the little wren that had hidden in its plumage popped out and - daisy fresh - soared way above the eagle's head: a triumph of cunning over brute force. The designation 'king' is probably because the wren is the hero of a fable so ancient that Aristotle knew it, about the election of the King of Birds. In Dutch it is winterkoninkje - little winter king. The German name for a wren is ZaunkГ¶nig,В which means 'king of the fence or hedge'. So, wrens skulk around in the undergrowth where you can't see them, unless they're flitting between bushes or are singing males, in which case you may spot one on a fence post or at the top of a hedge making a terrific noise and visibly vibrating with the effort. A troglodyte is a cave dweller and the wren is noted for its habit of foraging in cavities and under bushes hunting for spiders, flies, beetles, ants and caterpillars. Why? Well, there's a clue in the Latin name, Troglodytes Troglodytes (from 'trogle' - a hole В and 'dyein' - to creep). But the truth is that the wren is the the most common with an estimated 8.5 million breeding pairs, which is odd because - unless you're actually looking for them - you hardly ever see them. Ask your friends what the commonest bird in Britain is, and they're likely to say 'starling' or 'blackbird', perhaps.

#Jenny wren bird full#

THE WREN is a little bird full of surprises.