I was pruning back a rosemary bush to get rid of what I vaguely thought were frost damaged leaves left over from winter, so I’d have some less manky rosemary to cook with, and found these:
Which I immediately recognised from a photo in the London Wildlife Trust newsletter, though I couldn’t remember what they were [...]
I went for a walk in the local woods a couple of days ago, and forgot to take my binoculars because in my head I wasn’t birding, I was just going out to enjoy the spring sunshine. That’s silly, of course; its not something you can turn off. Even if I’m in central London, there’s [...]
A green woodpecker has been calling all day, and the sky is clear and blue. There’s a slight haze, but I think that’s all pollen and exhaust fumes rather than cloud.
So that’s one data point against the ‘rain bird’ theory.
Today we start with the word ‘plover’.
plover (’plʌvə(r)). [ME. and AF. plover = OF. plovier, later L. *plovārius belonging to rain, f. L. pluvia rain; in mod.L. pluvārius pluviārius; cf. Sp. pluvial plover, ad. L. pluviālis rainy, also Ger. regenpfeifer, lit. rain-piper, and Eng. rain-bird.]
Belon, 1555, said the birds were so called because most easily [...]
I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.
This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising [...]
I and the Bird’s latest edition is now up at The Greenbelt with links to all sorts of birdy goodness.
I particularly enjoyed the post about American Woodcocks at woodcreeper.com. Which reminds me: I think I read once that their display flight is the slowest powered flight recorded in any bird species which isn’t actually hovering.
I’ve been investigating more avian etymologies, looking for things of interest. There isn’t much to say about most bird names, because they’re self-explanatory (oystercatcher, wagtail) obviously onomatopoeic (chiff-chaff), or just dead-ends. For example, checking up on ‘merlin’, the dictionary says:
merlin (mɜ:lın). ME. [– AFr. merilun, aphet. f. OFr. esmerillon (mod. émerillon), augment. of esmeril :– [...]
I was looking back at some of my old digiscoped pictures yesterday.
‘Digiscoping’ is the trick of using your birding telescope as very high-powered telephoto lens. At the simplest level, you just hold the camera up to the eyepiece and shoot through the scope; to get the best results you need more sophisticated equipment. You could [...]
I was watching a dunnock in the garden earlier
and it suddenly occured to me that there might be a parallel between the word ‘dunnock’ and ‘ruddock’ - the old name for a robin.
And having got that far, I thought maybe ‘dunnock’ derived from ‘dun cock’ and ‘ruddock’ from ‘ruddy cock’. So I got out the [...]
Admittedly, it’s not actually a very exciting bird, even for a birder, looking as it does rather like a drabber-than normal town pigeon. And due to poor light, streaky window glass and so on, it’s a rubbish photo:
But it’s a new species for the garden: Stock Dove, Columba oenas. I don’t really expect to see [...]
It takes a lot to make me have sympathy for Bernard Matthews, whose company represents everything that’s worst in industrial food production, both the way they rear the turkeys and the revolting processed foods that they make from them. But I did get a twinge of sympathy when bird flu started killing all their turkeys.
I’ve [...]
I did the annual RSPB garden birdwatch yesterday. This was my third time and by far my worst list yet. Not because of any catastrophic decline in birds, but just because I had a rather dud hour. It didn’t help that I did it at midday, which is never the best time for birds.
Despite the [...]
BBC News has the story of a hunter who shot a duck, and took it home and put in the fridge thinking it was dead. According to the BBC:
The plucky duck was taken first to a local animal hospital, and then to an animal sanctuary for more specialised treatment. A veterinarian at the sanctuary said [...]
Best Plant
All those rainforest plants were nice, and I enjoyed taking wildflower photos while I was in Spain. But, not least because it’s nice to pick a winner that I can actually identify, I’m going for the Galapagos Prickly Pear, Opuntia echios. On islands where there are giant tortoises and land iguanas, they’ve evolved woody [...]
While I’m rounding up 2006.
2006 was a pretty good birding year for me, mainly because of my trip to Andalusia at Easter and Galapagos/Ecuador in the autumn. But I did get one lifer in Britain this year, which for a rather occasional, fair weather birder like me was very exciting. That was Horned Grebe (what [...]
It’s end-of-year list time. These weren’t all first published this year, and I daresay I’ve forgotten some, but they are at least all books I’d recommend. In no particular order:
Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama.
I blogged about this before. Simon is a serious historian (rather than, say, a journalist who writes occasional books) who writes brilliantly [...]
Well, both stuffings were good. The (more experimental) ginger one tasted great, though a little unexpected in an otherwise very traditional Christmas meal.
The local Great Spotted Woodpecker was drumming this morning. They are always a very early sign of spring, but December still seems freaky. It’s been a weird old winter, weatherwise, and my woodpeckers [...]
I finally got round to uploading some photos from the Galapagos to Flickr. The whole set is here. It includes some sealions:
boobies:
and of course tourists:
I went down to visit my brother in Cheltenham yesterday. It served as a reminder of how genuinely lovely the English countryside can look. At this time of year, when it’s too often grey and dismal, it’s easy to start wondering why anyone able to leave still lives at this latitude. But yesterday was the [...]
Well, I may be back in gloomy England, but I think I’ll return to my thoughts about the cloudforest. Sadly, the cloudforest isn’t a forest made of clouds. That would be like a Disney computer game come to life! You could jump from cloud to cloud collecting candy. Or something.
The lodge was at 2000m, and [...]