Birds imitate life.

There are a lot of blackbirds around these days or maybe I am just noticing them more. They are unremarkable looking but they have a beautiful song and the last few mornings as I walk with one or the other of the boys, I hear them whistling happy away. Benjy and I heard them this morning. I told him that the Hebrew name is Shacharur and we talked about whether the word comes from Shachor - black or from Shachar, morning. Probably both. It isn't a Biblical name nor is it Rabbinic as far as I can tell. Another possible origin is shachrur: freedom or independence. (As in Gan haShachrur, Independence Park where I saw the Hoopoe in my last posting). Some bright light of the Hebrew renaissance probably put all those things together and came up with the name for the blackbird (which is certainly nicer than Turdus merula, the latin name). Or maybe shacharur is from Arabic and has nothing to do with morning or black or freedom.
Anyway blackbirds are big news, here. HaAretz had a piece today about how urban birds are adapting to city life.
"There is a blackbird in Jerusalem's Sacher Park that imitates the whistle sounds men make at girls, and has simply incorporated those sounds into his regular songs," says Amir Balaban, of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, noting that girls even turn their heads at the blackbirds' whistle. (That's Amir from the bird observatory of a previous post, by the way).
So I went down to Sacher park -- which is right next door to the Kenesset -- to see if I could find the sexual-harrassing Shacharur. I didn't, but I did hear a blackbird chirping "I won't join your coalition unless you make me minister of the interior, and I don't care how many indictments there are against me." I even turned around and looked.
Finally, as I have mentioned, I am reading Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness." He talks a lot about his great uncle Joseph Klausner who lived a few blocks away from here (In a funny passage Oz talks about how S.Y. Agnon and Uncle Joseph were life-long enemies living on the same street. Klausner died before Agnon won the Nobel prize for Literature, thereby sticking it to Agnon twice, once because Agnon couldn't flaunt his success, and the second time because the city named the street -- where Agnon continued to live for the rest of his life -- Klausner street). Anyway, Oz tells of his admiration for Klausner's having minted several new Hebrew words, including 'shirt' and 'pencil', how as a writer you can write books and they will get read until some better book comes along but making a new word is a whole other order of impact. One of the Hebrew words in the list that great Uncle Joseph was responsible for is "crane." That jumped out at me because I had noticed that -- just like in English -- the word for crane comes from the bird; they are both 'agur.
I'll see if I can spot any cranes of either variety the next time I am up on Klausner street and promise to listen attentively and report back any thoughts they share on language or politics or picking up girls.