There Were Two Birds Sat upon a Stone

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There were two birds sat upon a stone,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.
One flew away and then there was one,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.

The other flew after and then there was none,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.
So the poor stone was left all alone,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.

One of these little birds back again flew,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.
The other came after and then there were two,
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.

Says one to the other: “Pray, how do you do?”
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.
“Very well, thank you, and pray how are you?”
Fal de ral-al de ral-laddy.

Origin

It shows up in the 1800s in Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England, but it was almost certainly much older. That refrain — fal de ral — wasn’t really invented for children. It was the kind of filler line you find in folk songs and ballads going back to the 1600s. People sang it to keep rhythm, or just because nonsense syllables are fun. You can imagine it shouted in a tavern as easily as chanted in a nursery.

Meaning

At first glance, this is just a silly song. Two birds sit on a stone, one flies off, then the other, and in the end they both come back and politely say hello. The fun is mostly in the rhythm and the goofy fal de ral-laddy chorus that kids would have loved to chant.

But the picture of “two birds on a stone” is hard to hear without thinking of the old proverb “kill two birds with one stone.” In that saying, the stone is about efficiency — get two things done with one action. This rhyme flips it on its head. The birds don’t get “caught” at all. One slips away, then the other, and the chance is gone. Only later do they return, as if to tease the listener: maybe next time you’ll be ready.

So it works two ways. For children, it’s just nonsense with a catchy tune. For adults who knew the proverb, it might have carried a wink — a reminder that opportunities don’t always land neatly, and sometimes they vanish before you act.

It’s short. It’s catchy. It’s easy to sing. Those three things are usually enough to keep a rhyme alive. The refrain connects it to a much bigger world of folk music, but for children it was just a silly song where birds vanish and return. Not famous like Sing a Song of Sixpence, but still a good example of how the nursery borrowed from older popular songs and made them playful.