This card gave us "blackbirds", but only two, not the four and twenty which were baked in a pie.
It is also thought that this rhyme dates to the eighteenth century, first being printed in 1744, though several references to the actual title, "Sing a Song of Sixpence" appear in literature from centuries earlier, and the sixpence coin was first minted in the sixteenth century. Curiously the 1744 version has "naughty boys" baked in the pie and not blackbirds, they did not replace the boys until almost the end of the eighteenth century.
These birds are the male, black, and the female, brown. At the bottom are three names in a cartouche the first one is "Merle" which is French for blackbird and it comes from the Latin, "Turdus Merula", which is the pair of words in the middle. The final word is "Schwarzdrossel", and this is German. All these words are in the singular, though there are two birds.
Now there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge about this set, but there are other cards, which also feature that curious double tin at the bottom, which looks like a broken tin to me but to others is simply one behind the other. You can find the tins in all manner of permutations, with the big titled one as the front or as the back tin, but this does not seem to mean that there were two printings. There are also bird cards with differently coloured tins but our set is only white tins.
By the way some of the cards also show nests and others do not, but we think it is all the same set, rather than a "birds" set and a "birds and their eggs" set.
The cards we have found so far, though one remains missing, are :
- Alouette, Alauda Arvensis, Lerch [skylark]
- Bouvreuil, Pyrrhula Europaea, Dompfaff [bullfinch]
- Chardonneret,Carduelis Elegans, Steiglitz [goldfinch]
- Elorneau, Sturnus Vulgaris, Gemiener Star [starling]
- Mesange, Parus Major, Kohlmeise [coal tit]
- Mesange a tete noire, Parus Major, Schwartzmeise [long tailed tit]
- Pinson, Fringilla Coelebs, Buchfink [Chaffinch]
- Rossignol, Erithacus Luscinia, Nachtigall [nightingale]
- Rouge queue des jardins, Erithacus Phoenicurus, Gartenrothschwanzchen [redstart]
- Rouge Gorge, Erithacus Rubeculus, Rothkethichen [robin]
- Verdier, Chrysomitris Spinus, Zeisig [Siskin]