The Significant Otter and me went to the seaside yesterday ... it's not far away. We have a theory that the further away from the sea you live, the less happy people are. I think that us humans find something at that edge that is uplifting and good. We didn't spot any " birds of note" but that didn't matter .. it's the process that matters, not the outcome. I remarked on the fact that Med gulls used to be much more prevalent a few years ago, and also put that into the context of there having been none at all not so long ago. I saw my first ever one on the roof of a Blind Home about 35+ years ago ... people came from miles around to see it. That, of course, was when I was " young" . We ... (well, me actually), went on to grumble about the obsession with "winning" everything. I was very disappointed with those Solheim Cup (?) golfing ladies a week or two ago who told the interviewer that "winning" was the important and only thing" and they would be " gutted" if they lost. Nothing else mattered. So, they don't enjoy golf then ? Unless they win . Brilliant. And it's the same with footy .. rival teams "hating" each other and even resorting to violence. It was Liverpool/Everton when ( and where) I was young. The thing is though, those Liverpool supporters would be mighty irked if all those other teams they "hated" didn't turn up, or went out of business. And this afternoon, when I encountered The King of Bryher at Grumbling Stumps, the very first thing he said to me was ... " What's your List ?" My standard reply to almost all of his questions these days is the universally applicable "I don't care" .... I don't want to get involved in any sort of "Who's best" thing, or " Who's ticked the Bimaculated Tinklearse" or any of that. Then I told him about my " Seaside" theory. And then I went home. And found, serendipitously, this lovely, laconic, lilting, luminous, lazy song ...... I know deep in my heart that you all are very keen to learn the words to that song and sing it to anyone who cares to listen. .... here's your big chance ... Of course, there is a slight suspicion that it's not actually " the seaside" that he's singing about !
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For a start, almost exactly a year ago ( 16.9.18)(post 220) the first Pinkfeet of the season flew over my house ... and yesterday, 17/9/19, I was watching a fine male Sparrowhawk circling high over the garden, with 1 crow and about 30 Starlings wheeling around above it , when to add to the scene, a flock of Pinks went over southward bound. Plus, a Bullfinch was calling away in the orchard and a Chiffchaff was singing loudly. That's biodiversity that is. And on top of that, when I looked back at that post, two steps further on, post 222, 18/9/18 , there was this poem wot I rote, all about a dodgy bit of I/D. That struck a chord too, what with me going to see that " possible?" "Eastern" ( maybe) Black-eared Wheatear .... with my monopodised scope being pretty useless in the strong gusty winds and chilling rain, I only got moderate views of it ... but the bloke on my right with a nice steady tripodificated scope assured me it was the EBEW.... but let's face it, I couldn't really be sure. And that's just the "sort of thing" that "poem" from a year ago was all about... We went to see a THRUSH It was really rather RARE We had to race and RUSH As we didn't quite know WHERE The stupid thing could BE So I got out the MAP And scanned it DESPERATELY But I was in a FLAP And I hadn't got a CLUE So we stopped and asked a MAN He was a birder TOO And he drew a sort of PLAN On a crappy bit of CARDBOARD With a lump of Gannet POO Then he walked off to STARBOARD Leaving us all thinking, WHO ? Could he possibly BE ? Maybe he's "Ticker" STEW Or Millington, or LEE ! That map just made things WORSE And we drove into a DITCH So we commandeered a HEARSE But we still did not know WHICH Would be the road to PICK As the plan was total CRAP And the suspension made us SICK So we stopped and had a NAP As all of us were KNACKERED Then we continued TERSELY And this time we went BACKWARD As it would only go REVERSLY But that was SERENDIPITOUS Because we found a straggly LINE Of twitchers, all quite CRAPULOUS But of the bird there was no SIGN It buggered off an hour AGO If only we'd not been so LATE We thought we should give it a GO And wait and wait and wait and WAIT . It seemed like years as we waited and WAITED In the cold and wet and sludge and SLIME It's true to say our breath was BATED We could have been there till the end of TIME But at last, at last, I saw the BIRD It was miles away, the size of a FLEA Up the line, we spread the WORD And everyone was so happy to SEE Something that vaguely looked like a ZOOTHERA "Vaguely" isn't really a strong enough NAME For the way we'd ID'd it (by trial and ERROR) Any rational person would say it was LAME ..... Of course, it "had to be" the BIGGIE But we "knew" it didn't look the PART It was long, and slim, a bit like TWIGGY But us lot didn't give a FART We were all very quiet on the long drive BACK We stared out of the windows without a WORD That sighting was a load of CACK It was less like a tick, and more like a TURD So, what is the moral of this TALE ? Why is "that sort of thing" so COMMON ? Here's why ...it's the way of the adult MALE To be at the top, not down at the BOTTOM ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Anyhow, it's only a subspecies anyway, and I got a rock solid Black-Eared ages ago, so I'm not too bothered. Now we have a highly appropriate bit of music ...a German band called Wunschdenken = " Wishful Thinking" with a song called Warum = why? .... No ..not that lot ... it stands for the .. ANNUAL BIRDING BLOG AWARDS I got an email from them ! Dear C. Sidebar, The ABBA panel have been reading your entertaining " Mini-Birding" blog with interest. We particularly appreciated your subtle changes of mood from frivolity to farce, seriousness to silliness, gravity to gormlessness and creativity to crap ! Your subtly "relevant" music choices have certainly widened our pop sensibilities as well. After long thought, and much discussion, we have decided to shortlist your work for the following awards ... "Best Birding Pun" for the "Fluke Hall /Fuke All" joke in post 616 " Best demolition of a top birder" for the repeated articles ( eg. post 503) about the King of Bryher. " Best Worst Bird Poetry" for your immense contribution to Terrible Bird Poetry and the generous championing of Wavely Newt. If you wish to be considered for an award, please contact us promptly, enclosing your entry fee of £20 per category. We await your acceptance in anticipation of a positive response. Signed ( well, I couldn't read it ). What would you have done, readers ? I know what I'm going to do !! I'm going to tell them to Fluke Off ! You might think I would be mad to turn down such a prestigious award. But I don't care !! In "Kingbird HIghway", Kenn Kaufman's remarkable and brilliant account of his youthful hitch-hiking bird-athon around America, there are many remarkable events .. and one of them was a huge "fall" of Myrtle Warblers ..... they had already watched huge numbers of them swarming in the hedgerows in appallingly cold and vicious weather, and then this ... " Back to the north on Bodie Island, Mytle Warblers were swarming along the road. Scores of them were down on the road shoulder, in the grass, searching for food. We tried making sample counts, but it was impossible. Our best wild guess was that we were seeing three thousand warblers per mile of road ... and even over the sound of the wind we could hear more, thousands more, calling in the thickets. With so many present, and food so hard to find, and the weather so rough, it seemed certain that many would not live to see the following day.We were not surprised to find several sitting on the road, inactive, eyes dull. Even the ones still up and flying were having problems; twice in ten minutes we heard a soft thud as the wind tossed flying warblers against the side of the car. ( Later) ... from behind us, loose groups of Myrtle Warblers would approach, coming from the thickets of Bodie Island. It appeared they had given up on foraging there and were moving on in a desperate search for food. The Myrtles would come past us and strike out across the inlet, struggling in the crosswind. Some were flying too low, and wave crests picked them out of the air. A few, overpowered by the wind or just disorientated, crashed into the bridge supports and fell, to be scooped up by the predatory Herring Gulls. Some of the warblers continued flying until they faded in the veil of snow. Just the night before, I had been admiring the strategy of this species. I'd been thinking that the Myrtle Warbler had it made: adapted to winter on the Carolina coastal plain, it avoided the dangers of the long trans-oceanic migration. Today we were seeing the other side of the coin. Those warblers that had taken the risky flight, that had made the long crossing to the West Indies or South America,were far beyond the reach of this death-dealing storm. But the Myrtle Warblers were caught out. It seemed there could be no perfect strategy. The variables would take their toll, culling the marginal birds from either side, leaving only the strongest to carry on. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A sad story, from a remarkable, inspiring book. I wonder why I chose this music .... * Yesterday I bought for a mere Squid The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry. It was going "cheep" at Grumbling Stumps I bought it for rather scurrilous reasons .. I was pretty sure there would be lots of totally crap and shite bird poems in it. With any luck they would ALL be crap and shite ! And then I could put the worst of the worst offenders on here. Oddly, there were no poems about Penguins in it. Here's one of the gormlessest "poems" in it ... Written by Thomas Hardy... very badly ! ... it's called " The Darkling Thrush*" I leant upon a coppice gate * When frost was spectre-grey, And winter's dregs* made desolate The weakening of the day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres*, And all mankind that haunted nigh* Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be The century's corpse outleant,* His crypt* the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.* At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overheard In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An agëd* thrush, frail, gaunt, and small*, In blast-beruffled* plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things* Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessëd hope, whereof he knew* And I was unaware. * Hang on ... which species of thrush ? *Do coppices have their own "special" gates ? Plus ... he'll ruin the hinges. He obviously hasn't read "The Country Cod " * What, exactly is/are "winter's dregs?" * I suppose he'd often come across lots of strings of broken lyres round his way then ? And it is ambiguous .. does he means, lots of lyres all strung out, or does he mean that the strings of the lyres have been removed and strung out ? We need to know. * Haunted nigh ? What does that mean ? * " Outleant" ... I think he was desperate for a rhyme there. * Whose crypt exactly are we talking about here ? * How could he possibly know that ? He's winging it now. * Oh, he's "aged" it has he ! I don't think so. No Svensson back then mate ! Plus, " Darkling Thrush" isn't in my copy. * That's " ruffled" then. * Aha ! He's worked out the size of it too ... it seems rather unlikely. * Terrestrial things ? He's completely lost the plot by this point. * The whole poem is a shambolic torrent of rampant anthropomorphism. Mind you, I still think footnotes should go at the top . They're often far more interesting than the actual thing they're about. Well, mine are anyway. The challenge I throw out to my dear readers is ... can you find a duffer one ? Coming soon... The Penguin Book of Bird Pottery !? Mipsrint of the Cetnury !! But now ... a lovely "winter" song .... "L'hiver" L'hiver se passe A la lueur des bougies
Nous restons la Allonges sur le lit On oubliera Mes envies de repis Ou ce que tu voudras Devons nous faire comme Si c'est ailleurs que l'on voit Qui nous sommes C'est le meilleur de la vie Qu'on se donne Que l'on se vole C'est l'ame en peine Qui trouve son écho Dans un livre ouvert Soumettons nous histoire De n'plus en faire Le silence est plus beau Sans la lumière Devons nous faire comme Si c'est ailleurs que l'on voit Qui nous sommes C'est le meilleur de la vie Qu'on se donne Que l'on se vole ( repeat the italicised bit x3) ( or else !) ( sinon !!) These make the ones I " invented" ( go back to post 612) look pretty normal ..... plus, I reckon that all of them are just as fictional as mine are.... read on ! But what about the music ? There aren't many songs about testicles, or itching, or magnetiised cockroaches for that matter. You've got to be impressed at their inventiveness ..... I know I am ... Seeing as I was up in Lancaster visiting my wonderful sister, I sort of made a "slight diversion" to "get" the Eastern Black-Eared Wheatear at Fluke Hall. When I got there it was actually windswept, squally-rain very-cold Fluke Hall. And for half an hour there was Fuke All to see. That stupid pun was the highlight of the day for me ! The Significant Otter would not approve. BUT .... eventually it appeared, and "we" got " "good views" of it for the next shirt-soaking, blown-over-sideways chillingly-cold 30 mins. And I foolishly tried to get some pictures. And here are the least crap ones. But they're still utterly crap ... classics of the Crapsnap genre. No laughing at the back ..... or the front, for that matter ... Here's two attempts at a close-up crapsnap, but they're rather dismal. As a change of tone, here's somebody doing something well ... unlike those pictures. ... I got a book a few days ago with this picture on the front cover. But the more I looked at it, the less likely it looked. Is such a picture possible ? Without any photoshopping or jiggery-pokery ? I think not. I must say, however, that the battered binoculars look the part. And the hairy arms. But the really odd thing is, why have they put a battered, scratched and totally tatty pair of bins on the front cover ? Is it some sort of tribal totem .... like carrying a spear covered in the blood of the enemy ? Or driving a tank covered in the scars of battle. And talking of tanks, if I collide with a tank whilst driving, surely it's not my fault, because the camouflage is specially put there to make it hard to see. [ The more I look at those binoculars, the more they look like mine.] [ I did get them ±23rd-hand, so maybe they are.] On top of that, I've no idea what that bird is ... and that's hardly surprising, because its a book about the birds of Argentina. And what about this ... my binoculars, for some unknown reason, were on the back of the settee , big end facing inside, little end facing outside, and looking at them from 4m away, they look completely hollow. As if there was nothing in there. And all traces of the "smaller" eye-lens end have vanished. It's more like looking through the cardboard thingy inside a toilet roll. Maybe there aren't any "innards", and it's all an illusion . A spell is put on the empty tubes as they leave the factory to "binocularise" it. Binocularisation is probably what they call it. You all be off now to try it yourselves. But not the driving into a tank thing. Here's the perfectly odd music to suit my own perfectly oddliness .... Also, I've already told you all about how bins and scopes arrived on earth ... and why they've all got odd names like Kowa and Swarovski and suchlike ... it's all on the end of this link ...
(this will appear when I've found it .) In the meantime, here's a startling analysis of what binoculars and telescopes really are ..... all rather Freudian ... 218-scopes-and-bins-their-symbolic-hinterland.html As you all know, I have lots of theories of my own invention to account for all the various things that are going on in this world. And one of them, which has stood the test of time is .... " When you see a picture of the sun in a newspaper, it will have NO sunspots.!" I've greeted every such picture with great glee over the years .... but now... ( see above picture) ... that one seems to actually have a sunspot on it ... just below the middle on the right, at about 4 o'clock. BAH ! But ...there is a get-out clause .. it might be ... a bird ( but if so, what sort) a plane ( doesn't look right) a blemish in the paper ( it happens) there's one on the left, half-way between the tall treetops and the top. ..and several smaller ones scattered around. Some of my still totally accurate rules are ... .. if you take your telescope, nothing worth looking at will appear. .... especially if you've carried it a long way. ..... if you DON'T take your telescope, the rarity will be just too far away. ... if you're at a twitch, but the bird isn't, don't leave the main bunch. ... as soon as you do, they'll all see it. 100% certain. ... if there's a screeching of tyres in the car park, 'tis Lee Evans. .... and he's 99% certain to be wearing almost nothing. ... never correct anybody's identification .... .... they won't thank you for it .. ..... and they might well punch you on the nose. ...... never lend The Flat Controller any of your optics. ....... all he will do is grumble loudly about how crap they are. Well, there's an awful lot of them, and I don't want to use up all the ink. Here's some mysterious lumps..... We found those at the base of a Tombstone .... and there were more of them at the bases of other tombstones ... nowhere else ! Ooooooooooo-er ! I haven't seen owt like them before. They might be something the "gardener" has done to prevent, er, something that need to be prevented. The light sandy colour does support that idea. But why were they only next to three of the gravestones ? And why would he/she scatter them about so randomly ?? Could they be little mounds to stick little fireworks in ? Or dinky rockets ? Or to put poison in ? Or were they part of some sort of occult ceremony ? There's lots of plausible scenarios. But I think they were done by some creature or other. The mounds were about 8cm across and 4 cm tall. And the little hole was about 1cm across. If any of you lot out there have any idea what makes "those sorts of things" I would be glad to know. While you're thinking about that, here's Gillian Hills, I wonder why I chose her, and a retro sort of video .... Bird Notes : Yesterday's Highlights.
At 9pm, I did my usual " listening in the dark" owl-monitoring thing ... which in recent weeks has been distinctly owl-less ...but this time there was an ace male Tawny Owl right close to the house ...so close I could hear it even before I opened the back door. The Significant Otter was most impressed. Earlier, a Kingfisher whizzed along the river, very low ... unfortunately The Significant Otter didn't latch on to it quickly enough. Also unfortunately, I can't hear them anymore. It has taken them a long time to recover from those two consecutive very hard winters we had some years ago. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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