Jump to content

swissbarry: Orniwhatsit


Swissbarry
 Share

Recommended Posts

Well, I’ve become an expert at something.  Back in England my knowledge of birds was limited.  Oh, I knew a hen when I saw one, and a budgie, and probably an owl, but that was about it.  The vast majority I simply classified simply as “Little Brown Jobs” or “Big Grey Jobs”.  Oh sorry, I learnt how to recognise a penguin, too, after I nearly ran over a nun by mistake.

 

But out here in rural France, the place is fairly teeming with birds.  Birds of every size and shape and colour.  There are bloody great things with claws and teeth, that might actually be eagles if they aren’t buzzards or kites or vultures.  And huge cormoranty things that could just as easily be storks or flamingos or cranes.  Or pterodactyl, for all I know.  I went for a walk with a pal the other day, and he kept stopping to whisper excitedly things like “Jay!”, “Bittern!”, “Redstart!”, “Try and keep up please, won’t you?”, and “Crow!”  I was enormously impressed and I determined there and then to become proficient at bird recognition.

 

To start, I thought I would compile a list of all the birds I already knew, and I’ll tell you, I surprised myself.  Alongside robins and owls, I had exotic things like emus and ostriches, and parrots, geese and swans.  But let’s face it, you’re unlikely to encounter an ostrich or a parrot in France, so that wasn’t too helpful.  No, I needed to be able to pick out woodpeckers, and kingfishers, and nightingales, and blue-bearded minch dwellers, and the other myriad occupants of the forests of Haute Vienne and the Dordogne.

 

So I bought myself a bird book.  Birds of Europe: a spotters’ guide” it said.  Hah!  Now don’t get me wrong: the book was beautifully illustrated and extremely informative.  Each page explained, in great detail, the characteristics of each bird and – importantly – their distinguishing features.  So I learnt that in order to differentiate, for example, between a stone curlew and a Senegal thick-knee, you should be aware that the latter has less yellow on its bill.  And although the short-toed treecreeper has toes the same length as the normal treecreeper, which is a bit of a disappointment, it is nonetheless a bit smaller. That’s helpful, eh?   And the tree pipit, I would have you know, has a shorter hind claw than the meadow pipit.  So that’s alright then. 

 

What the book didn’t tell me was how to find these damn birds and persuade them to sit still long enough and close enough for me to find their picture in the bird book.  Not much chance of spotting a pippit’s hind claw when it’s whizzing past in a blur of feathers at 80 miles an hour, or of checking whether that distant dot 1100 feet up in the sky is a tawny eagle or a spotted eagle!  And even when the birds are reasonably co-operative and let me get within 500 metres of them, the differences between them are so insignificant that you would need to examine them under anaesthetic with a magnifying glass to tell them apart.

 

So how can I describe myself as an expert, you might ask.  Well, expertise is relative, is it not?  And though I might not know as much about birds as David Bellamy, I know some people who know less than me.  This is very important in life.  If you always mix with people less clever than yourself, you can always appear relatively intelligent, see? 

 

Oh, you should see me now when some of my townie friends come over from England to stay.  They come from places like Middlesbrough and Darlington, and are therefore babes in arms when it comes to bird recognition.  The nearest they ever get to a bird is eating a MacChicken or reading Page 3.  So I have great fun taking them for a walk, then stopping suddenly to examine a small pile of poo on the ground and saying something like “Hmmm, there’s been a wilch-gobbler here, and it looks like it’s been eating grass seed again”.  Or “Hear that?  Gosh, if I’m not mistaken that was the mating cry of the Granfrew’s tit, just out of earshot”.  One of my favourite ploys i

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
  • Create New...