Categories
Nature

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2006

If you’re in the UK, there’s still time to do the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2006 this weekend. Just watch your garden or local park for an hour, record all the bird species and what the maximum number you saw at one time was, and submit the results to the RSPB.

This year I saw:

blue tit – 6
great tit – 3
coal tit – 1

siskin – 3
chaffinch – 7
greenfinch – 5
goldfinch – 2

nuthatch – 1
wren – 1
dunnock – 1
goldcrest – 1
robin – 1

jay – 1
magpie – 1
carrion crow – 2

great spotted woodpecker – 2
ring-necked parakeet – 2
feral pigeon – 8

song thrush – 1
blackbird – 3

which isn’t bad. Marginally better than last year, though I’m interested to see I had three starlings last year, because there aren’t any around at the moment. Still no house sparrows, sadly. I’ve seen one about 5 minutes walk away, so perhaps in a year or two they’ll be back here.

Categories
Other

AOMSHJDOTBD

Geoffrey Chaucer has a blog. It looks like posts only come along every few motnhs, but this made me laugh. Via Ancrene Wiseass.

Categories
Culture

Mask of the Week

More from the BM, because they’ve got so much good stuff. This time a mask of Dzoonokwa:

Kwakwaka’wakw, 19th century AD, from British Columbia

Dzoonokwa is a giant of the forest, or Wild Woman of the Woods. She eats children, stops people from fishing, and encourages war. In one story a young woman comes across a Dzoonokwa catching salmon; she kills her and her family and uses the mother’s skull as a bath for her own daughter’s ritual empowerment. They were not all evil though; when a Dzoonokwa came across young men she may give them supernatural gifts – a self-paddling canoe, or the water of life.

Kwakwaka’wakw masks represent her with pursed lips so that the dancer wearing the mask could frighten the crowd with cries of ‘Ho, ho’.