Author: Harry

Categories
Me Nature

Spain Bird List

I’ve divided the list into not-very-taxonomically-coherent chunks to make it easier to read.

Little Grebe
Great-crested Grebe
?Mediterranean Shearwater
Cormorant

Little Bittern
Cattle Egret
Squacco Heron
Little Egret
Grey Heron
Purple Heron

White Stork
Glossy Ibis
Spoonbill
Flamingo

Greylag Goose
Mallard
Gadwall
Shoveler
Garganey
Pochard
Red-crested Pochard

Griffon Vulture
Short-toed Eagle
Booted Eagle
Black Kite
Marsh Harrier
Kestrel
Lesser Kestrel
Peregrine

Red-legged Partridge
Moorhen
Coot
Purple Swamphen

Avocet
Black-winged Stilt
Collared Pratincole
Ringed Plover
Kentish Plover
Grey Plover
Sanderling
Dunlin
Curlew Sandpiper
Common Sandpiper
Redshank
Black-tailed Godwit
Bar-tailed Godwit
Whimbrel

Black-headed Gull
Yellow-legged Gull
Audouin’s Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
Little Tern
Gull-billed Tern
Royal Tern (!!)
Whiskered Tern

Wood Pigeon
Collared Dove
Cuckoo
Great Spotted Cuckoo
Little Owl
Swift
Pallid Swift
Hoopoe
Bee-eater
Ring-necked Parakeet
?Blue-crowned Parakeet

Crested Lark
Calandra Lark
Sand Martin
Swallow
House Martin
Tawny Pipit
White Wagtail
Yellow Wagtail
Wren
Robin
Nightingale
Wheatear
Stonechat
Blackbird

Garden Warbler
Blackcap
Sardinian Warbler
Whitethroat
Dartford Warbler
Sedge Warbler
Zitting Cisticola
Savi’s Warbler
Cetti’s Warbler
Reed Warbler
Great Reed Warbler
Melodious Warbler
Chiffchaff

Spotted Flycatcher
Pied Flycatcher
Great Tit
Blue Tit
Long-tailed Tit
Short-toed Treecreeper

Woodchat Shrike
Azure-winged Magpie
Magpie
Jackdaw
Carrion Crow
Raven

Spotless Starling
Golden Oriole (heard)
House Sparrow
Tree Sparrow
Chaffinch
Linnet
Goldfinch
Greenfinch
Serin
Corn Bunting

Categories
Other

Whee!

Nintendo have announced that their new games console, referred to previously as the ‘Revolution’, is actually going to be called the ‘Wii’. Personally I think that ‘Revolution’ was a fucking awful name – or at least a leadenly literal-minded and unimaginative one. I can’t quite decide about ‘Wii’, although it does make a good logo:

I think it’s a good thing that it’s neither too techy-sounding or too macho, but it may have strayed too far into Hello Kitty territory. Nintendo are keen on the association with ‘we’, but I’m not sure that makes up for the associations with small Scottish things and urine. If they were going to go for a clean, modern sounding monosyllable, how about Kii? Or something.

Categories
Culture

poetry madness

Taking out a copy of his grandfather’s Varsity Rag album, he mixed Death in Leamington into the Josh Wink dance hit Higher State of Consciousness.

You couldn’t make it up. A mind-boggling article about John Betjemen in the Guardian.

Categories
Napowrimo

#22 – ‘the little screen’

On the little screen
that shows the progress of the flight
Europe is a blob of green
between the beige and blue and white.

Sand and sea and snow,
expanses that once defined
the limits of the known,
the limits of the mind.

We no longer need to wonder
at the unfamiliar;
the wild places just pass under
while we drink our cans of beer.

Categories
Other

Figgy Dowdy, Sussex Pond Pudding and English food

I got back to England to find, appropriately enough, that some food blogs, English or otherwise, celebrated St George’s Day (Apr 23rd) by cooking English puddings, cakes, biscuits and other sugariness.

Why British food has such a bad reputation, and whether it’s deserved, is a question for another day. One kind of British food that has always been easy to defend is the baking; and one of the nice things about it is that it seems to be a genuinely popular tradition. Despite the good work done by Tea Shoppes in the Lake District, to a large extent, the cake-making tradition of Bakewell tarts, fruit cakes, tea cakes, spice cakes, lemon drizzle cakes, oatmeal biscuits [etc etc] is passed on through local charity cake sales and coffee mornings. I almost feel moved to make some parkin. Mmmm, parkin.

Another British tradition that is perhaps less lively is the steamed suet pudding. And yes, that is indeed a dessert made with beef fat and steamed. With central heating, we just don’t have the same appetite for piles of calorific stodge any more. But excitingly, two food bloggers tried particularly noteworthy steamed puddings: Sussex Pond Pudding (which I’ve wanted to try for some time) and Figgy-dowdy (particularly vital reading for fans of the Patrick O’Brian novels). Both of those bloggers do a far better job of explaining the dishes than I could.

A round-up of other entries can be found at Becks & Posh.

Categories
Napowrimo

#21 – ‘Too much espresso…’

Too much espresso
on an empty stomach.
I’d almost forgotten what it’s like;
the jitteriness, the edges of the world exaggerated,
so each lamp-post is a monolith
against the sky.

How wise he was,
that Ethiopian goatherd who, seeing
that the berries of a certain bush
had made his flock
go wild-eyed and nervous,
decided he should try them.

He understood that sometimes, people need
to be uneasy in their skulls,
to whet their senses until
they can almost see
all Plato’s demons in the walls.