BIRDS

birds are great but having one of those psittacotic freaks on yr shoulder does not sound like fun

don't get me wrong parrots r basically chill but mainly for sitting in cages and listening to coal chamber

there are loads of birds here at night, guessing nightingales? never see them but <3 their songs

nightingales are creatures of deciduous woodland not urban greenfield

probably robins, mebbe songthrushes

btw you shd all look at my link a few posts upthread

I like the sound of birds at night.

LJ are you a bird watcher / ornithologist?

in my early days I was much more devout, but yeah I guess

Lapsed Ornithology still pretty cool IMO

may the bird be w/ u

Go in peace and love to serve the birds

damn feels so weird now lj knows i'm not akshly in ldn but a delapidated fortress in a slovakian birch forest ;_;

u shd host a vibrant, classico-noise-based alternative to exit festival

i really like birds and always have done, but i've never got any sort of knowledge about them....just like to observe the local fauna yknow

it feels so weird that nobody knows why all the sparrows have disappeared

Wow, 68%

ime it looks like more than that even

they're a v gregarious species and depend upon colonies - scarcities of food, disease or any kind of downward fluctuation (usually caused by changing agricultural procedures) means that entire colonies will subside

http://i.imgur.com/VZNGz.jpg

http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/biologicalsciences/falcon/

they're falling out of the sky in the US.

nightingales are creatures of deciduous woodland

Read this first as "delicious woodland."

Us bird massacre due to fireworks (apparently) Happy new murdering birds eve (maybe) you lot >:(

Now happening in Sweden...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12118839

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/12170571

Fancy that!

they know

they know it's time

I've heard of birds getting drunk on fermented berries before (waxwings iirc). Never heard of them dying from it though. RIP starlings

fuckers be optin' outta the foodchain

rip starlings, sorry i called you shit birds upthread

I've heard of birds getting drunk on fermented berries before (waxwings iirc). Never heard of them dying from it though

In the version of this nth-hand anecdote that I heard, they did die

was going to chatter idly about my own bird-spotting news but will keep it off this doomed thread of bird deaths for fear of jinxing my new feathery palz

DO IT

(red kites again? lol)

In the version of this nth-hand anecdote that I heard, they did die

Lots of recorded instances of it, so maybe they sometimes do :(

Oh, did I talk about red kites on here already? I do not remember. The other half's father (who takes birds v seriously) is coming to visit soon and is most insistent on being taken to east Oxfordshire to see them, though. Hope they put on a good show.

No, this week's bird news is that there's been a leucistic Egyptian goose hanging around my walk to work all week. I had never seen the like before. Fed some ducks this lunchbreak and had it eating birdseed out of my hand. Wait, real birder types wouldn't approve of that at all, would you? Ahem.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By vinous pomace and fermented grain

Egyptian goose

FAKE GOOSE

Wasn't familiar with that Nabakov couplet, thanks ledge!

Last leucistic bird I saw was a snow white blackbird.

Oh, did I talk about red kites on here already? I do not remember.

think it was you who affirmed my claims of their chiltern ubiquity!

also, handfeeding migrant rarities is some sort of heady fever-dream of twitching which could only happen to a casual birdwatcher

Apparently Norfolk has a lot of Egyptian geese. Don't think I've seen a full-colour one outside a WWT centre, never mind the small patchy pale brown + white thing (with bright yellow eyes!) tagging along with the greylags who are winter regulars on the path to work has been making me happy all week. Thank you, little guy.

The bigger, hissier geese don't quite seem to know what to make of it, but it's never far from them, so it seems to have half-joined the gaggle.

I hate collective nouns, so I don't know why I used that one. But yeah, did wonder if its readiness to hand-feed means it came from one of those WWT places (don't know if they all do hand-feeding but the one near Belfast does). It's not ringed or anything is all I know.

And yes, no red kites here in Oxford itself but almost as soon as you leave the city to the east you start to see them. At least, that's been the case so far. Probably when we take the in-laws to see them we will be stood on a windswept hill for a week staring into empty skies.

God that was long. Do some work, spacecadet!

a passing of spacecadets

LJ you need to rank the finches, buntings, sparrows, tits and larks.

imo

broadly,

pipits > buntings > tits > finches > larks > sparrows, and I *like* sparrows

will rank individual birds at some point

that'll take some time.

Audible chuckles

I do love Otmoor but see more starlings over Kidlington Sainsburys ...

My wife took this one through her office window today. It's a red-tailed hawk eating a pigeon.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs890.ash1/179798_499492798799_667643799_6350014_1191043_n.jpg

That hawk looks so sad, like he feels bad for the pigeon or something.

Now I like gulls most of the time, but all morning there's been one herring gull who has been hanging around a rabbit hole on the grassy bank outside my window, and every time a baby rabbit pops up to have their first nibble of fresh spring grass, this fat fucking gull chases them and tries to eat them.

fucking awesome

the birds in NZ are rad btw and I am going to buy a book and identify them all. there is a sort of blackbirdy one that is everywhere but it has gaudy white patches all over its wings and a very haughty supercilium. I think if I were a NZ bird I would much rather be it than a kiwi.

I'd never witnessed this behaviour before but it seems like it's definitely a thing...

picture linkified cos it's sad and gross

xp yeah, I would be a total noob with nz birds

herring gulls bring out the Princess TamTam in me more than probably anything else in the world. that picture ownes.

Talking of NZ, I always remember seeing kea on Attenborough's Life Of Birds staking out shearwater burrows, listening intently for movement and then digging the chicks out with their bills once they knew they were inside. Evil bastards.

Might not have been shearwater btw, but some burrowing bird anyway.

Ooh, not sure I've seen a kea! I did see a fucken kickass hawk from the car tho. Gonna investigate our birds of prey pronto -