This whole " Worst of" thread wot I've been doing has boosted my readership by a huge and remarkable 400% .. from 1 to, er, 4. So I'm Bumping on the Jandwagon whilst my luck lasts ...... and this time I am focusing my attention ( or what's left of it) on "Nature" columns in the papers. So ...here's what I think is the worst one ... and I've spent the whole week scrabbling in all the dustbins in the road to find them ... these first two tell us some incredibly astute revelations about Black Redstarts and their "ecclesiastical" nesting habits, and also about moles and their powerful front feet.... gripping stuff ! .... more incredible insights into the secret life of plants .... and we also learn that the Black-Tailed Godwit is " one of our most remarkable birds, so peculiar in fact that sometimes great chunks of them can't be seen. " Well well ! I wonder if the Hobbys mentioned below are really " much more frequently noticed by "people" these days" ...... who are these " people" and could they tell a hawk from a handsaw ? And we are reminded that fish are often in lakes, or rather, "a" lake. Blackcaps, apparently, are " drifting about", the lazy sods. I'll leave you to pick the bones out of these last two .. I don't seem to have the energy after all that cutting-out ... I think that's a worthy winner ...... but if you know of a duffer one, please let me know at [email protected] or as a comment. It is a drizzly night ..... there's a bit of a crescent moon ... and only 1 measly star is visible ... so here's " Sbia ar y seren" .... "look at the star" ... if you want to see my previous " worst things" , here's the link .... 659-the-worst-foreign-bird-guide.html
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Some of my avid readers might recall that " 3-circles" survey that Daisy did .... ...but if you weren't one of them , you can find it here .... 643-a-spot-of-avian-arithmetic.html Well, since then several other "students" have got in touch about them .... because they have done a similar thing. Gertrude, for example, had a 4-circle survey area ... and just like Daisy, all her circular plots had a radius of 1 km . ...and like Daisy, she had a bit of time to spare, so she surveyed that middle bit as well. ... but she hadn't worked out the area of it ... so she had to do a spot of arithmetic. .... actually, she had a much easier job than Daisy ..... .... but can you, dear reader, work out the area of that middle bit ? ...... of course you can ! Well, that's sorted that out . But then Alice sent this in .... she too had done a similar survey, but with 5 circles.... .. so ... what's the area of that "inside" bit now ? ... and this one came in a few days later, from Penelope ... she was daft enough to do 6 !! ..and Leonora went one better ( or worse) with 7 !! Obviously, this is all very important ! And what we really need is a general formula that will work "it" out for any number of circles. And I'm sure that you will all have thought of that for yourselves. And done it. Well, that's sorted that little problem .... we can now move on to the far more placid waters of music .... here's a song about a heron ..... crëyr in Welsh, and if you're lucky enough to have more than one crëyr , that will be crychydd. Which makes sense really. Except that in other dictionaries there are various other opinions. But .. on with the music .... Back at post 660 I featured a graph ..... and asked you to work out what it was about. There were a few clues sprinkled about .... well, tiny ones. .... but, just in case some of you didn't work out what it was .... here's the wonderful and rather revealing "annotated version" for you ... So ..... it took me 9 years to get my list up from 200 to 300. it then took me 6¼ years to get from 300 to 350. and it took me 9¼ years to get from 350 to 375. there's a hint of exponentiality there. And that means ... what with the graph getting steeper and steeper ... ... it could well take me another 18+ years to get to 400. .... maybe considerably more. ..... that "extrapolated" bit might easily be steeper. ..... and by then I'll be dead anyway. And you might well say ... why not make a bit more of an effort hit the 400 And I would say .... I'm not doing that chasing around any more ... I haven't been doing that for a long time. Partly because dipping gets more painful with age ! And partly because I don't want to .... been there done that. And I'm happy doing the local stuff now. Pottering about. That gets me about ¾ of a tick per annum ! Maybe I was never made for such great heights ..... This is the "answer" to a question from the future ... It is the number of sales of "The Observers Book of Birds" I'm sure none of you fell for all the other ridiculous choices . Having written all that stuff about Starlings creating little groups when perching on overhead wires, and shuffling about to ,presumably, infiltrate other groups and so on, or maybe it is all some attempt to signal to us lowly humans... when my ever-dimming brain remembered these pictures I took ... but on cranes instead of wires. It is on the blog somewhere but I can't find it, so I've dug out those very same pictures .... for your fierce perusal. ..and just as they did on the wiressh, they are, if only schlightly, schifting about schiftily. Schee if you can get a shufty of the schlightly sshifty schuffling Schtarlings ! You know it makesch schense. I DO remember hoping that they might win " Bird Photograph of the Year" ... let's face it, they are pretty schtriking.... they would certainly give all the usual ssnnappers a run for their schpondulix ! Hey.. those cranes look a bit like a ladder.... - Leiter in German ..... so here's a song and a jolly story about , er, that ! ... and here's another thing .... in Welsh, the words for "ladder" and "school" are the same.. "ysgol." .... because they are all in the business of making upward progress, and the French " école" is pretty similar, and the Spanish "escuala" ..so there !
When I'm round at my sister's house I generally get to sit right opposite the railway line. There it is ! And often there's a string of Starling sitting there. Quite a feat in itself. But when you watch them, there's a lot going on. Mostly fairly mystifying. For a start, there's a lot of shuffling left and right .... sometimes just a few inches, sometimes quite a long way. This often results in a bird joining an adjacent little group. Why ? And then there's the groups themselves. Why ? How ? When a Starling comes in to join the others, what decides where it goes ? Does it "recognise" other Starlings ? Are they family groups ? Does an individual avoid others, because it knows they are aggressive ? Do Starlings then have " body language.?" When they get put up by a train, do they regroup as they were before? I would love to find out that some researcher somewhere spends their working life filming it all, identifying patterns-of-shuffling, group sizes, group faithfulness and the like. You can barely imagine the excitement of it all ! It would have to involve marking/ringing the birds in some way so as to be able to get very far. And monitoring nests to get to know the members of the various families in the area. And there's loads of graphs to be drawn, and pie charts, and plenty of obscure formulae using µ and ± and ° and « suchlike. On a completely different tack, could they be trying to tell me something ? It's not unlike a sort of Morse Code or Braille. It makes you think. Hey ... those little groups could be gangs .. it could all be "gang culture." And here's a truly edifying video ... First thing, "the" male Gt. Spot was at the fat feeder this morning. There's been no sign of the female and/or the juv that have appeared a few times... but not recently. Then, between 8 and 8:30 this morning about 800 Fieldfares and around 150 Redwings flew north behind the house . Impressive. I took our current " looked-after" dog out but by the time we'd got ready the show was over. Bah. But later in the day I drew a graph ... here it is ... So ... having perused it ruthlessly, what do you think it is all about ? And what does it tell me? But if you can't fathom it, don't think twice, it's alright ! I hope you all sang along with that.
Yes ... the third of my now famous " Worst" series is here at last ... if you don't remember, I've already warned you about the Worst Bird Book for Young People and The Worst " Big Year" Book .... and now, I've picked the Worst Foreign Bird Guide from a huge pile of not-so bloody-awful ones ! There it is up there ... you will, if you are a faithful reader of this heap of tripe, have seen it before in an entirely different context .... the sheer impossibility of that image. But WHY have I picked this bilingual Spanish/English ID guide ? Well folks, it is the ILLUSTRATIONS. Let's have a shufty at some of them shall we ? WHAT DO WE WANT .... COLOURS ! WHEN DO WE WANT THEM ? WHEN WE'RE OUT BLOODY BIRDING YOU OLD FOOL !!! But .. that's not all ...look at this litany of not-knowing-much .... There's a lot more of "that sort of thing" .. it doesn't exude confidence does it ? One more thing ... it's the sort of book you might need to carry around with you ... but it's a couple of inches too wide and tall to fit comfortably in any reasonable-sized pocket. Just saying ! On the plus side, if this was the only book in the world, you could probably learn Spanish from it .. or if you ARE a Spanish speaker, you could equally learn English with it. In spite of what you might think, I haven't put this book on here just to show you my (not so) brilliant Spanish, it is genuinely duff. No. It's just that Spanish is a truly fine language, and a very sensible one too, except that there's too much of the subjunctive. And their music is wizard ... this is about Swallows .. golondrinas. Here is a short identification summary from a well-known publication ... but I've rearranged all the words in alphabetical order. I've had to miss a few out so as not to give the game away too easily. Especially the name of the bird itself, and a near congener. Although quite a few of the words will be strong clues. Ideally, I'm hoping you could almost reconstruct the account. However ... and it's a big however ... it's very hard for me to tell how tough it is ...because I've "done" it, so I know the "answer." A a a a alarm and banks, bored breast-band. brown "brrrit" by chiefly cliffs. country Distinguished dry earth-brown etc. European Feeds Flight flitting, gravel gregarious. Habitat. Identification: in in less more Nests open over pits, ponds, river rivers, sand short Smallest socially, Song, strongly Swallow's swooping, "tchrrip" ; than tunnels twittering. under=parts upper-parts Voice: water. weak white with with ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Who knows, I could write an entire book of these, "nicked" from all sorts of sources, which would become a massive Christmas hit and sweep the world ...well, it certainly needs sweeping. Seriously. Seriously though, I would seriously like to know if "that up there" is far too hard, or far too easy ... I can't tell, as explained above. Seriously. You could "fill me in" ( a rather unfortunate phrase) as a comment or at [email protected] ..or maybe better, "do" one of those like I've done, and send it to me so I can have a go at it. Seriously !! ..and now, for some reason or other, here's a cover of " Seriously" ...( seriously) Here's some birds ... but what might the next one be ? Drymocichla incana Tarsiger cyanurus Laniarius atroflavus Aegithina viridissima Leptopterus madagascarinus Muscicapa indigo Passerina cyanea ??????????????? This is one of those short things I put on occasionally to stop you getting bored to death with all the long rambling things........ Oh naïve little me
Asking what things you have seen And you're vulnerable in your head You'll scream and you'll wail 'till you're dead Creatures veiled by night Following things that aren't right And they're tired and they need to be led But you'll scream and you'll wail 'till you're dead But give me to a rambling man Let it always be known that I was who I am Beaten battered cold My children will live just to grow old But if I sit here and weep I'll be blown over by the slightest of breeze And the weak need to be led And the tender are carried to their bed And It's a pale and cold affair And I'll be dammed if I'll be found there But give me to a rambling man Let it always be known that I was who I am It's funny that the First chords that you come to Are the minor notes that come to serenade you And it's hard to accept yourself as someone, you don't desire As someone you don't want to be Oh give me to a rambling man Let it always be known that I was who I am Oh give me to the rambling man Let it always be known that I was who I am At the "right" times of the year, I used to get Meadow Pipits flying by in reasonable numbers during "dawn +" watches down at the salt-marsh. I even used to get them over the house. If you want to improve your house list, I can recommend sitting out the back in a nicely reclined deck-chair and giving it a go. But in recent years, those Mipits simply haven't turned up. And here's another thing ... round here we haven't had a decent " Brambling Year" for ages. And here's yet another thing ... Wiggly Park used to have Green Woodpeckers ... but it hasn't had any for many years. One "thing" for us humans is ... we tend not to notice "things that aren't there". It takes a while for it to sink in. But we all take notice pretty sharpish when something new turns up ... Nuthatches simply weren't available when I moved here ... not for years ... but now, they've moved in gradually and have graduated from being non-existent to being hardly worth a glance. I'm sure you have similar comings and goings wherever you are ... but they may well be different ones to mine. .. something is happening but you don't know what it is ! |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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