This is the ONLY picture of DC smiling . And it's not a very convincing smile really. And I'm going to tell you why. The reason he drove forty miles to get to Barnard Castle was nowt to do with relatives, they're nothing but a hassle his real aim was twitching, 'cos on those castle walls the target bird had shown quite well, the watchers all enthralled ! but that was twenty mins ago Oh no! Oh no !! Oh noooo ! I know that's just a silly rhyme (a better one I couldn't find) The crowd was getting out of hand And Dominic and his merry band (that's all his family in the back) Were desperate to tick the mega It was a quite elusive beggar ! Dom's eyesight wasn't up to much So he raised his pricey nockers He always carried 30 pairs Each in their individual lockers It's the sort of thing rich people do To show they're richer than me or you. It showed again, to his delight And I spotted it, though time was tight dos gris, ailes rouges, bordées de noir, Gorge noire aussi, we yelled "phwoaar" !! But what it was (you ought to know) The evidence is all on show. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well Dom, if you ever get to read that, I hope you take it in the right spirit. Meantime, here's the World Famous Music Spot ... ... and like the life of us mere mortals, Short and Sweet ...
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This first bit has nothing to do with birds .... I couldn't resist using Roy's 80th birthday as a reason for starting this with one of his many fine songs. Most every day since I was 17 I've picked up my guitar and played this song ..... I've played it in folk clubs (remember them?), in subways, in various people's gardens ..... and I've seen him playing it loads of times....even at The Royal Albert Hall. I've only been to the RAH twice, and both times the performer was called Roy. The "other" Roy was Roy Orbison. Right ... that's me being nostalgic and soppy. Back to the birds .... This morning I went to Grumbling Stumps, our nickname for our local Bird Reserve.. and I spent about an hour there. And I began to notice that a large majority of the visitors only had cameras. This seems to be quite normal these days. I've christened them as " Aztecs" ...after well-known popsters Aztec Camera. Some of those cameras could well have been the sort that tells you what the bird is. It seems to be catching on .... I wrote about a couple of them just a few posts back at 1068. And that's OK .. well, slightly worrying as to the upcoming ubiquity of such things. But once these contraptions get started, the damage is done. My daughter, who lives down south, tells me that in some of the local hides battalions of camera-carriers bung up the front rows and stay there for hours, totally blocking the view for all the other behind them. And, she reports, those front-row-snappers are mostly big bulky blokes. "They" have put up a notice asking them politely NOT to stay for hours on end clicking away all day. It hasn't worked though. They just rip the notices down and chuck them out of the windows. I sometimes wish I was big and strong and nasty-looking. I'd gleefully sort those thoughtless bastards out no messing. But I'm not. Hey-ho. Grrrrr. How can you tell that they're not watching the eclipse ? Well, after all that grumbling yesterday about probably missing the partial eclipse what with the crap weather forecast etc, I did actually get a decent view of it. Woo ! Crumbs ! But not for long .... a couple of minutes as the cloud thinned, but still thick enough to be safe to look at ...and there it was, a very pale sun with a biggish curved bite out of its top. But then the clouds thickened up with only 20 mins of the eclipse left. But that was OK. I've had worse. And there's a brilliant photo of the eclipse in today's i ( Friday 11th June) ( Other newspapers are available )(..but more expensive) BUT .... birds .... that's what this blog is supposed to be about. The lady next door is constantly asking me what various birds are that she's seen. She's got form on this. She hears cuckoos in midwinter. That sort of thing. She hears birds and then tries to tell me what they sounded like. And every time , I've no idea what "it" could possibly be. I usually fall back to the ever-reliable "Great Tit Theory". Or, of course, there's the " Starling that imitates things" ploy. Over the years, we've had a few of them. Very convincing they were too. The trouble with all that, is.... it's so easy to dismiss everything she says .... ... but there's always the nagging thought that this time, she might really have spotted an actual " interesting " bird. And talking of eccentrics, there's an old gaffer who walks down our road most days, who looks like someone from the 1940s ... baggy tweedy trousers tucked into ancient socks, tweedy jacket with 67 pockets all bulging out with something or other, National Health spectacles, a stick ( of course) , and draped round his neck , a 5-ton pair of pre-war binoculars ... (that's pre-first-World-War) ... the whole 1940's look. Seriously. Sometimes he has a gaggle of hangers-on, similarly ( to various degrees) decked out, all creaking along, probably from the local Darby & Joan Club. Hey ... I'm going to try to get a crap-snap of him/them when I get the chance. Now there's a project. I'm not taking the piss out of them ... I'm just fascinated. Hey ... maybe they're all ghosts. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And now, music ..... relevant music too ... tangentially ... We'll get back to the birds shortly ...... tomorrow at 10:08 am the moon will begin to nudge in front of the sun ... and the partial eclipse will finish at 12:22 pm. Should look good. BUT .................... And after weeks of heat, mainly clear skies and no rain at all etc , you'll never guess, it looks like rain is on the way. Here I am at 5pm Wednesday 9th, and the whole sky has darkened considerably. Grrrr. This is not good for eclipse-spotters. So ... back to birds. One thing I've noticed lately is the total lack of any young birds. Normally we should be getting clusters of LTTs around the fat feeder, juv. Starlings gobbling up all the food we put down ... that sort of thing. This is prob. due to the crap weather making everything a month late. And this very afternoon I strolled down to the estuary and the nearby flood . And said "flood" has been shrinking and drying out dramatically , to such an extent that now it is about the size of a table tennis table, and the lonely Oik that was there had 90% of its legs above water. The salt-marsh only featured two little Egrets. Nowt else. Anyway, I've bet The Significant Otter £1 that it'll be raining by 7pm. What about a relevant spot of music ..... But to put all that into perspective, here's a jolly excerpt from " The Accidental Universe"
here it goes telling us just one of the many ways our universe might finish up ..... Further subtle quantum effects may occur, which would cause the black holes to slowly evaporate away, leaving only a residue of radiation. Protons in the material that escapes a black hole demise might also gradually decay, ultimately into positrons, which would begin to annihilate the remaining electrons. Whether or not complete annihilation would eventually occur depends on the details of the model. In any case, the ultimate condition of the ever-expanding universe would seem to be a tenuous and fading bath of photons, neutrinos, gravitons and perhaps a few electrons and positrons. Nothing further of interest would then happen for all future eternity. We're all self-taught Now that's a thought Years of getting it right .. and wrong And learning every call and song And every day there's more mistakes But worry not ... that's what it takes. Who knows how many thousand days to know the birds and all their ways it takes .... and all those miles to walk and cycle, drive and hitch and stalk to see, or not to see, "the" bird. The whole palaver's quite absurd but we do it, we love it so Till our last breath, Hey ho! Hey ho ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We haven't had a "poem" for ages and this one went through many stages and lots of hastily discarded pages and NOTHING in the way of "WAGES" ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OK, we don't learn the ropes totally alone ...... but about 99% of it is. So ...music time .... and totally relevant as well...... Well, obviously there must be. You could google " What's the biggest bird in the world ?" And then, maybe, " What's the heaviest bird in the world ?" And would both questions get the same answer ? But that's maybe not the whole story. Our previous bird populations might have harboured much bigger/heavier birds. And then the obvious next question could be .... "Why ?" Why is a bigger/heavier bird not currently possible ? And if there were earlier heavier/bigger birds, how much bigger/heavier were they ? Anyway, I'm going to try to come up with some answers before actually googling anything. Sometimes the "process" is more interesting than the "result." So ..... there's a few things to think about ..... And ... we'll have a highly relevant spot of music .... This morning I whizzed along to Grumbling Stumps in the crapmobile with a more or less free pass from TSO ( The Significant Otter)( My long-suffering partner). Woo. And then ..... a first for me ... I had an encounter with two ladies ....they had a smartphone-camera-thingy that identified birds for you ..... with visuals and with sound. I knew these contraptions existed ... I wrote about them a while ago and how they could be " The End of Proper Birding" but they were dead chuffed with it. I wonder if I can find said heart-ickle .. yes I can ..... 848-in-which-one-of-my-predictions-comes-true-oh-no.html For some reason or other our conversation wandered round to Eric Hardy . Yes ... that crafty-camera-couple were on their first visit to GS ... and I trumped them by many decades ,having first visited GS thousands of years ago when I was about 14 ... led by said Eric H. That's him up at the top there. A leg-end in his own life-time. After all that excitement ...... some excellent sounds .... as Tracy Duggan would say ... ..and if I can find them, here's the links to my world-famous Eric Hardy parodies ....
181-an-affectionate-parody-of-the-writings-of-eric-hardy.html 481-elric-hardly.html 582-more-about-eric-hardy.html This one isn't a parody ... it's all about him .... 179-eric-hardy.html I found "Fingers in the Sparkle Jar" in one of those mesh bins where they put all the books they can't sell and they hope some halfwit will buy one of them for 99p. So I thought ... OK, maybe the approx 10% bad reviews of it on Amazon were wrong. So I've quarantined it for a while, and yesterday I read some of it. And I didn't like it at all ..... it rambles along, half the time you can't even tell what he's on about, it's full of teenage angst, there are lots of passages where I couldn't work out who was talking ...... over several bits of reading, I got more and more annoyed with a sea of over-indulgent, massively over-introspective misery memoirs. One thing it won't do ... it won't improve your birding one iota ! Not a jot. In fact, I suspect it would put any young beginner right off the whole idea. And that's all very sad, because I've liked all his previous stuff. But here's a " critical" Amazon review of it ... I'm not the only one who's very disappointed ... Before I start, I must emphasise that I am a fan of Chris Packham. He is a great presenter, full of empathy and unfailing enthusiasm for the natural world. I am also a fan of wildlife programmes and Chris' presence and skills on the many programmes he has fronted makes me fairly comfortable with the concept that he may well be the natural successor to David Attenborough (though hopefully not for a long time in the future!). I assumed that this book would be an autobiography, which was why I bought it. Unfortunately, it was absolutely not. It couldn't be further from it. This book is terrible. I started to read the Introduction but. after pages and paged of boringly wordy nonsense about ladybirds and ice creams, I moved on to Chapter One, which was no better. The Author's decision to use a dozen words where two or three would have sufficed prompted me to move on again, to Chapter Two. Yet more obscure rambling. I checked a couple more chapters but, alas, they were all relentlessly boring, obscure and self indulgent. Very disappointingly, I couldn't find any indication of his talent and expertise. I wanted to hear about his motivation, his passion for his subject and enthusiastic imparting of his huge knowledge (think Spring Watch/Autumn Watch/Winter Watch). But none of it was there. Just convoluted description and endless obscure verbosity. Even the Acknowledgements were over-effusive and self indulgent. I understand his limiting difficulties but surely some extensive but friendly editing would not have come amiss. This is the first time in nine years of Kindle reading (covering hundreds of books) that I have awarded only one star, which is something I really regret. But I'm afraid it's justified. If you are thinking of buying this book, don't. Sorry Chris. But I'll continue to hold you in high regard and enjoy watching you on TV. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Time for a beautiful song to cheer us up ..... |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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