Rolling Avian Issues Thread

Saw this beautiful creature on the way home from work.

http://i.imgur.com/KZt3Yyw.jpg

I am going to choose to believe it wasn't after the cute baby moorhens.

frogs emerging yet? plenty of those to go around

Don't forget the robin!

i wish we could have uppers style music on this thread with lj's pigeon gif as a background

8-bit main refrain of my display name's inspiration imo

Oh man. Two STORKS, lolloping down the Thames. One perched on a houseboat. I am not making any of this shit up. I saw it from the tenth floor of a client's apartment block, but white storks they were without a doubt.

What can it portend?

this was the best photo; you can see it about to land on the houseboat

http://i.imgur.com/yEdQNg4.jpg

nice table

Where is that? I'm having real trouble placing that bridge, I must have been away from London too long

someone i know used to have a flat in that apartment block
some seriously wealthy people around there

never seen a stork

cool foto on the wikipedia page

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Stork_picking_at_rabbit.jpg

wikipedia also says jmw turner painted from that church but i can't find it

from the other side of the river, though

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-battersea-church-and-bridge-with-chelsea-beyond-d00857

ah man, it has a black tail so I'm not sure it wasn't a crane or an escaped yellow-billed stork now

just west of battersea bridge btw

Without a doubt? They were Egyptian Geese. Fooled by the white scapular patch. Bastards.

http://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/v4xtHhd.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/QR5BZIs.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/v4xtHhd.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/QR5BZIs.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/ySgJ8GC.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/v4xtHhd.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/QR5BZIs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ySgJ8GC.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/v4xtHhd.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/QR5BZIs.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/63spTmP.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/ySgJ8GC.jpg

Nice goose!

Do you get many of them around London? I know, London is a big place and that is a stupid question, but I have only seen the one around here. I think I told you of Oxford's leucistic Egyptian goose - I felt sorry for it being all on its own, so far from its natural habitat which I imagined to be, ooh, Egypt. But when I went to the Mosel valley last summer the riverbanks were full of (non-leucistic) Egyptian geese. Went to stroll through the hypocausts of the Roman baths at Trier, which was pretty cool, but I may have been more excited by the goslings huddling by the entrance

in other local bird news: six moorhen chicks in local nature garden pond; a few greylag goslings; saw two cygnets riding on their mother's back on Fri; keep seeing a heron near work and wasn't sure if it was the same one but I'm fairly sure it's at least two now

plus sorry to say, regarding your wood pigeon post, I put food out on the balcony railings which is generally eaten by magpies and wood pigeons (I was hoping to encourage the bluetits in the nearby tree but I've only seen them come down twice - maybe they do so when I'm not looking, though) and they seemed a whole lot more excited when I experimentally put some leftover chips out than by all the birdseed I'd been putting out up till then

You do get them in London, yes, and mostly the given coloration too. They tend to frequent large ponds in places like Hyde Park and Regent's Park but I've seen them on Blackheath as well. They're fairly tame things - unsurprisingly, given the UK population is largely made up of escapees - and I wasn't aware of the vivid black-and-white wing patterns in flight, hence the stork confusion.

Greylag goslings abounding on the Thames also, along with yer usual cormorants and gulls. Saw a tern up by Thamesmead the other day, too. 'Tis the season!

Your actions were not only generous but apposite - city birds aren't Real England until they're on a junk food diet, m8

Novel excuses for being late for work: I just picked a half-grown pigeon out of the river after it missed the bank

it was very cold and wet and shivery but it did not want to be dried on my coat and I didn't want to scare/squash it any further so I just left it to shiver in a tree

I admit its chances are probably not great but they're better now it's not in the river, anyway

True story: a few years ago I went to a Chinese restaurant around Chinese New Year season and they had a special menu on which included "pigeon in capital sauce"

we tried to order this but were told it had run out

at the end of the meal one of the fortunes in our fortune cookies read:

Be kind to pigeons, and one day they will build a statue of you

These are the chronicles of my attempts to be kind to pigeons

Previous attempt did not end well, young pigeon fell out of tree, broke wing; nearby animal rescue place did not answer phone, so took to vet who put it down: nothing he could do for a too-young-to-fly pigeon with a wing that would probably never set right. Perhaps best not to dwell on that attempt. Hope today's goes better.

omg that is a delightful confluence :D

i remember handling a dying pigeon at school and then freaking out in the subsequent science lesson that i had every contagious disease known to man, running to the toilets and washing my hands about 11 times

you did a good thing, and who knows, it's july, it might warm up. next time buy it some chips tho ;)

the delightful confluence was for the fortune cookie, not your doomed previous attempt, that was noble if not delightful

i'm in favour of all small subversions of natural selection

More worried about what I've caught from the river water than what I've caught from the pigeon tbh! Though people do swim in that stretch occasionally and I have not heard of any dying afterwards.

Are we not ourselves nature? xp

this could be an entire discourse of philosophy, let alone an ILX post, fwiw

being part of "nature" not the same as influencing the mechanisms of natural selection maybe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyCvFIZxWc

The owl was treated for its injuries at a local veterinary clinic, but later died of stress related to the incident. Moreno received a two-match ban, a $560 fine from Colombian football's governing body in addition to veterinary costs for the owl's treatment and was ordered to do community service at a zoo.[12]

a strigiform, no less

but whose, it will be asked, were the acephaly issues

http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/1/4/4/9/0/2/5/angry-tweety-19834498220.jpeg

have you recovered?

Bridget Fonda. Rowrrrr.

― dinnerboat, Thursday, 28 August 2014 21:41 (Yesterday)

there would appear to be more parakeets in london than in previous years, perhaps because it was a mild winter? there are thousands of the things and they are behaving as if they own the place

there's a roost in the central copse of wormwood scrubs common that is awesome and terrifying to hear at dusk

btw I noticed that the bird on the photo page of my new passport is a fulmar. fulmars are lovely birds, they fly with the stiffest of wings and have tubular noses

fulmar honoratus erit

fulmar honoratus in silva

tbf tbf they're birds of cliff and sea, an arboreal setting wd confound 'em

fulmar honoratus desilva

i don't even care what bird is printed on yr latepass

what is the most pretentious & overrated bird

flamingo, easy

but there are others

the flamingo at least has a weirdly ascetic diet

xp - you should think about the implications of how quickly you click "submit post"

oh ZING! that's some chirpy stuff

flamingos are rated?

flamingos are p rated. flamingo iconography in pop culture is p extensive

p

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