BIRDS

choughs

coastal members of the crow famly, tend to nest on cliffs, i think they might be the official bird of cornwall or wales or some shit

there's a little robin redbreast that is in my garden everyday. He perches on top of the same seat and shits on it.

i was in Austria at the time.

oh shit they might be Alpine Choughs then! Actually, given the colour of their beaks, I'd say that's exactly what they are. My bad.

Argh I can't believe I made such an elemental error

Don't be angry with yourself, at least you know what they are.

Different beaks. But damn it you were close enough!

xp

now all you gotta do is pronouce em correctly

crows are bastards

now all you gotta do is pronouce em correctly

Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley

crows and gulls are the kings of birds imo, theyre just harder, cleverer, more resourceful and more straight-up aware of their surroundings than the sweet innocents of the avian world

and crows, on top of this, are passeridae, the more advanced and sophisticated half of the phylum...it's everything in one package: brilliant flying skills, advanced social interaction, improvised eating routines, fearless predation

Dunno if you've seen them in the wild LJ, but choughs in particular are amazingly agile flyers and so at home too in the windiest and wildest of places. Awesome critters.

you dare doubt the lengths this not-quite-recovered ornithologist would go to to see a chough? pfah!

anyway, yeah, when we went to Wales and scouted out Skomer Island that one time, choughs aplenty cavorted by the cliffs. this was approximately 2 weeks before the sea empress disaster fwiw

Ooooh, never been to Skomer. Gonna wait till the kids are a bit older and then take them birding up there to see da puffinks. This year's plan is to show them OWLS. Failed miserably to manage this last year though.

was a grey wagtail in the park this morning - i see him about twice a year

I think grey wagtails ought to lobby parliament for a name change. They've definitely been short-changed there.

probably the yellow and pied wagtails got named 1st, then someone saw the grey one and was all bollocks gotta keep up this colour + wagtail thing we got going on.

wagtails are more or less my favourite birds

the misnomer of "grey wagtail" and the manner in which its colourful hues reveal themselves at closer inspection (along with th fact that it incorporates the colours of the other two, gaudier wagtails) forms an intrinsic part of a section of a long poem i wrote

songs for ornithologists:

CD-R80: Songs for ornithologists

the grey wagtail landed on the path in front of me today and i got within 10ft of him as he was hopping along and doing the sinusoidal flight thing they do. great tail feathers.

in other bird-related news, the swifts are back which is always a joy. why they fly back from south africa to W12 every year is beyond me but i'm glad they do. we get flocks of 20 or 30 of them at times, dogfighting amongst themselves. and the overcast weather means they were flying quite low this morning when i was out. they fly past level with my 3rd storey windows on occasion, screaming as they go. nature's stukkas.

omg you totally read me, we had the first swifts of summer last weekend, they rock the skyline like nothing else

http://markthog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/turkey-vulture1.jpg

These guys are everywhere in the Appalachians. In the summertime I love watching them ride the thermals, so beautiful and graceful. Of all the birds, Vultures and condors are the most metal.

imo the raven is more metal

we are having a frenzy of birds in our back yard these days, and just this week i saw a pine grosbeak and a indigo bunting.

birds are so cool.

imo the raven is more metal

The raven is not metal; wtf. They start out as wee ravens listening to TMBG and the oldies station and grow up o listen to sorta artsy shit like Kate Bush & Kronos Quartet, claiming they like modern composers & that Stockhausen is 'amazing' but it's all kind of a front.

If they like anything metal it is like Kayo Dot & shit tho they have a guilty soft spot for female-fronted Eurometal lite.

Ravens or Vultures! I think we need a poll!!

What would Varg chose?
http://gfx.dagbladet.no/pub/artikkel/5/54/540/540102/varg1_320_1215331211.jpg

ABout which bird is superior or which is more metal?

varg choose eagle owl lolz

Which is more metal. I think Vultures are more metal while Ravens are more goth. But if you're talking in terms of birds, IHMO it's the raven.

So does this mean goths better than metal? I don't think Varg would approve.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-M5PyYHH2kk/SBbHQ0n4rzI/AAAAAAAAAk8/FpBCx2i9Q3Q/s320/varg_vikernes_story.jpg

next door neighbor's cat killed a rainbow lorikeet in my backyard this morning. sad affair. such handsome little guys.

http://geoffhill.com.au/uploads/images/birds/rainbow%20lorikeet.jpg

so, flock of great tits in the park this morning so i stopped and had a look (because often there are long-tailed tits in the mix too and we don't have those back home). then i noticed a jay on the ground pecking a young great tit into unconsciousness and flying off with it in its beak (closely followed by a mob of other great tits). do jays do that, eat smaller birds?

i did later see a mixed flock of great and long-tailed tits by the hospital (which is now solely used for filming tv dramas) but they looked very bedraggled in the rain.

apparently so:

http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/jay.htm

"Jays feed on acorns, beech mast, fruits, insects, small rodents, bats, newts, birds' eggs and young birds."

Just like the other crows I suppose - they'll eat whatever's going. Must be easy pickings for them when the young first leave their nests. 'Our' blue tits are yet to fledge, I think it'll be in the next couple of days. Has been pissing it down here which won't help them, but it has kept all the cats away.

On my ride in this morning there was a young blackbird in the gutter at a really busy junction in town. Luckily it was a red light so I could jump off to pick the little guy up and move him to safety. So bedraggled though, poor feller.

A bird used her body as a dam to stop overflowing drainpipe water from soaking her chicks

Not as depressing as it sounds (the bird didn't die).

omg <3

mistle thrushes are the best thrushes fwiw

Which is more metal. I think Vultures are more metal while Ravens are more goth.

http://www.myspace.com/vvltvre

Hey, good walk today, not birding or anything but took the bins and saw a firecrest, a peregrine, a water rail, two kingfishers and a half a dozen snipe. Also grey wagtail, buzzard, nuthatch, green woodpecker, reed bunting, kestrel and heron. Guess the cold, calm weather helped a lot. Didn't see any owls though, which I was really hoping to see as it got dusky.

where the hell do you live and can i live there too

This was deepest Sussex - banks of the river just north of Arundel. Lots of ducks too.

sweet

wonder if there were any smew. good time of year for merganser and shoveler iirc

hang on a WATER RAIL - those things are IMPOSSIBLE to see

have also never seen nuthatch...jeez

Smew like deep water iirc, so go to old gravel pits and reservoirs for those guys. For nuthatch you want some good broadleaved woodland, oak or something like that. If they're in yr area though they'll normally come to feeders and start bossing everything else around.

Lucked out with the water rail, it was that cold and icy that one of them was just hanging around in plain view. Didn't register it at first cos it was just this brown blob hanging around with the moorhens, so I assumed it was something equally boring.

Maybe I'll try and make 2010 the year I finally see a hawfinch.

have never seen hawfinch either! wonder if they are as delightful as goldfinch and bullfinch

there's a neat li'l gravel pit reserve in sevenoaks i used to go to all the time...got good waders and ducks there, mad good. should visit again soon! nuthatch and treecreepers remain beyond me

seeing a water rail like that is insane. i've heard them (at the aforementioned reserve) but not seen iirc *roots out checklist* oh wait i have! awesome.

ah, misspent youth

last night i was in a pub with upto11 and upto11's friends whom i'd never met before and i found myself describing the habitat and physiology of the duck preserved in a box on the pub wall. from the angle i sat i could not tell if it was an adult female red-breasted merganser or an adult female goosander (in retrospect it was almost certainly a goosander) so i gave both as options and said it was at least a merganser of some sort. a 'goose-like duck'. i believe the words 'freshwater' and 'maritime' left my lips at this point. i am a world-class conversationalist

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8434907.stm

RIP feathered one

Died of an incurable mallardy.

http://www.naturepics.co.uk/p7ssm_img_1/fullsize/Fieldfare_fs_fs.jpg

^ flock of these beautiful things on the one tree in our back garden today. Also redwing and blackcap.

We've had loads of redwing! I posted about them here: ITT: revealin' some mystic thruths l8r, stay tuned!!!

Fieldfare are scarcer. Tough call as to who's better looking.