What birds (are you/have you been) watching? What birds have been watching you?

[Padraig]

A lovely book

A poem? A poem about a bird - a rare bird indeed.

Of Difference Does It Make

During the 51-year existence of the Northern Ireland Parliament only one Bill sponsored by a non-Unionist member was ever passed.


Among the plovers and the stonechats
protected by the Wild Birds Act
of nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-one,
there is a rare stint called the notawhit
that has a schisty flight-call like the chough's.
Notawhit, notawhit, notawhit
- it raps out a sharp code-sign
like a mild and patient prisoner
pecking through granite with a teaspoon.

Tom Paulin

[Richard Tarleton]

Chough: a crow with a college education (C Douglas Deane)

[jayne lee wilson]

When I was - maybe 8 or so, I noticed crow-like birds with curved orange beaks down at the sea - on the embankment of the Wirral peninsula near Meols. My Observers book of Birds revealed that they were... Choughs. I didn't have any idea then that Choughs were resident in North Wales. A short while later I discovered a man near our school with a large aviary where the birds flew free, and there were...two Choughs in it. I remember thinking that these must have been the birds near the sea - but feeling very confused by the thought!

Indefatigable Songsters... at dawn each day, three birds still singing: two Wrens, each beginning just precisely as the other fades, and a Chiffchaff, who's been the herald of daybreak daily since April. I hope he found a mate. Then, startlingly, late in the evening, a Song Thrush struck up nearby, deep in a neighbour's shrubbery. I haven't seen one all year and thought they were absent locally.

Have you watched a Wren when it sings? Its whole body throbs and pulses, its wings rise and fall with the flow...

[greenilex]

Notawhit...I didn't know it, thank you thank you.
I do read TP with enthusiasm as a general rule.

I have bird poems written for three of the five grandchildren. The other two are an insect and a cat.

[greenilex]

Posting almost simultaneously, jlw.

I wonder, if some dinosaurs clearly are and were so musical, whether others of greater stature might have uttered musical roars, groans etc?

Do you think the T. Rex lifted his head from his dinner and summoned his mate with a cadenza?

[jayne lee wilson]

Singing dinosaurs! What a lovely idea! Who knows, but I'm inclined to think that the birds all around us really are their descendants. Just look into their reptilian eyes...

[greenilex]

The difficulty is that I cannot imagine satisfactory proof at this distance in time... after all, I am not suggesting they were clutching sheet music.

[Richard Tarleton]

Have you watched a Wren when it sings? Its whole body throbs and pulses, its wings rise and fall with the flow...

Nice bit of film from the RSPB Community website, though this one not giving it quite all

Choughs more NW Wales these days - their presence linked to traditional/sympathetic farming practices. Doing well in SW and W Wales also....

[amateur51]

A poem? A poem about a bird - a rare bird indeed.

Of Difference Does It Make

During the 51-year existence of the Northern Ireland Parliament only one Bill sponsored by a non-Unionist member was ever passed.


Among the plovers and the stonechats
protected by the Wild Birds Act
of nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-one,
there is a rare stint called the notawhit
that has a schisty flight-call like the chough's.
Notawhit, notawhit, notawhit
- it raps out a sharp code-sign
like a mild and patient prisoner
pecking through granite with a teaspoon.

Tom Paulin

I enjoyed Mr Paulin's schisty flight-call Padraig - many thanks

[amateur51]

My two-bird goldfinch visitors have become four! Two juveniles have joined their parents. They have the same wing colouring as their parents but as yet lack the red, black & white head feathers - perhaps they have to pass some proficiency test before they're allowed to wear such fancy head-gear?

[Richard Tarleton]

I enjoyed Mr Paulin's schisty flight-call Padraig - many thanks

C. Douglas ["Jimmy"] Deane's characterisation (above) in part a characterisation of the call - an aristocratically drawled "keeaoow", instantly recognisable amid the plebeian chatter of coastal jackdaws. In Ireland their distribution continuous from Donegal to Wexford, though they've largely gone from the N Antrim coast where I first got to know them.

[amateur51]

C. Douglas ["Jimmy"] Deane's characterisation (above) in part a characterisation of the call - an aristocratically drawled "keeaoow", instantly recognisable amid the plebeian chatter of coastal jackdaws. In Ireland their distribution continuous from Donegal to Wexford, though they've largely gone from the N Antrim coast where I first got to know them.

Might I have seen one on Anglesey, RT? I have a vague childhood (as opposed to my vague adulthood) memory of seeing one there. My mother was brought up in Caernarfon and Anglesey was a nice day out when we were staying with her parents.

[Richard Tarleton]

Definitely! N,W and SW Anglesey especially. N coast as far E as Gt Orme or so, Lleyn, Bardsey, selected parts of Snowdonia... Continuous down Welsh coast to Pembrokeshire, then a bit of a gap for Carmarthen Bay (wrong sort of coast), then outposts on Gower and SE Wales......

[amateur51]

Definitely! N,W and SW Anglesey especially. N coast as far E as Gt Orme or so, Lleyn, Bardsey, selected parts of Snowdonia... Continuous down Welsh coast to Pembrokeshire, then a bit of a gap for Carmarthen Bay (wrong sort of coast), then outposts on Gower and SE Wales......

Great stuff RT - not so vague after all then

[jayne lee wilson]

Nice bit of film from the RSPB Community website, though this one not giving it quite all

Choughs more NW Wales these days - their presence linked to traditional/sympathetic farming practices. Doing well in SW and W Wales also....

Lovely footage RT, that song-and-response is exactly what was happening here... What lovable little things they are. My previous cat Hooch brought one in on a dark wet night, so I scruffed him and he dropped the inert bundle to the carpet. It still pulsed gently with life, so I cradled it in my palms near a radiator... suddenly it became VERY lively! I was able to lodge it back in a privet, getting joyfully soaked in the process!