Last word about birds.

Summer now and ever since springfling the blackbird couple has chartered me for a ' feed the family ' program. They beg loudly for bread and peanut butter, a shovel of worm containing rubbish, an apple or strawberry.
Mostly 4 times a day they come and urge me on for scraps.They enter the kitchen and have quickly learned not to leave in flight, but walk out safe and quietly. Only once I had to pluck the both of them from the upper window-glass.
The young ones are now well able to fly and eat by themselves but they still chirp for service like babies. High time to give them a little backpack and send them on a cheap interterritorial flight. ( I'll miss them but....)

I took countless pictures. The parents have lost all shyness. The young have been told to hide. So there's just one to show, half hidden on the fence.

The family:

The dad

The dude

The dame

The Blackbird, Common Blackbird or Eurasian Blackbird (Turdus merula) is a species of true thrush which breeds in Europe, Asia, and North Africa,

The young are fed by the parents for up to three weeks after leaving the nest, and will follow the adults begging for food. If the female starts another nest, the male alone will feed the fledged young. Second broods are common, with the female reusing the same nest if the brood was successful, and three broods may be raised in the south of the Blackbird's range.

Nice photos. What we call blackbirds on the Left Coast are really starlings and red-winged blackbirds. I was surprised at the blackbirds (Amsel) when I lived in Germany. They're bigger and rougher looking. Latin turdus is cognate with English thrush and German Drossel. There's also the Jackdaw which in Czech is kavka whence the author's name Kafka.

[Edited to clear up my muddled meaning.]

...somehow I doubt it...


It's also in Tasmania, where it is an exotic pest. It was introduced to Australia in 1863. They are especially annoying to vintners, who have developed measures such as timer activated cannons to scare them away from the grapes. We have them in our garden. They eat our raspberries.

In these parts, the Red-winged Blackbird is well-loved, for its beautiful plumage and cheerful calls. It is not considered a Starling (family sturnidae) which is considered a pest and will flock in the hundreds. The Red-winged (family icteridae) is not nearly as common. In fact, I've never taken a photo of one because they tend to frequent wide-open fields and do not usually eat at feeders. But now I have a project for this summer. I will get a pic! :0)

I once (and only once) espied a migrating flock of yellow-headed blackbirds, whilst walking along a marsh in a suburban nature center -- quite amazing!

And as a harbinger of Spring.

Sorry about that, I completely muddled up my meaning and posted with editing what I had written. I've corrected it. What I meant to write was that true blackbirds like the red-winged blackbird and starlings are lumped together in the folk category blackbird. (Even though starlings aren't really black, more brown mixed in.)

Here we call Starlings rats on wings. They are vermin. Western Australia is trying desperately to keep them out. The desert between the West and the Eastern States is a natural barrier to them, but they move along the seaboard and have to be trapped and shot to keep them out. Here in the East they are endemic and cause untold damage to native birds by outcompeting them.

grackles be like that. take over a feeder they do.

This is de doofpot.

>Groetsjemeu!!!!

de doofpot!

De doofpot is for deafman's ears! or....
see former page.

In BC starlings were brought from England and are taking over. The only blackbirds we have in my part are the red wings who live in or near wetlands and perch on bullrushes to sing.

Dear Zed , my last and final word about birds is that the Yellow-headed Blackbird and the Redwinged Blackbird , whether in flocks or solemly single are Not related whatsoever to my well loved blackbirds who are not called blackbirds at all but Merel, (pr. May-rhol)and have nothing to do with starlings either.
They belong to the thrush family and they SING! (Except for deafman's ears.)
They are no pest in lands where they have a healthy set of natural enemies.

Right now at dusk, while writing this post mr. black male merel sings his heart out ! That can go on for 10 to 12 minutes. Darn de doofpot!

blackbird sound

Dearest Bran,

You do dissemble! I don't believe for a minute that you'll never post about birds again; I certainly hope you do! I enjoy a birdly discussion now and then...

I just want to make sure you understand that although our Red-winged and Yellow-headed Blackbirds are not of the same family, they are of the same order, Passeriformes, and most definitely are not pests, and do sing very pleasantly! :0)

Red-Winged Backbird call

Your equally bird-brained friend,

twosleepy ;0)

A much nicer adjective than the usual boring old mechanical 'avian'

Our blackbirds sing sweetly too but they are still introduced pests. I much prefer the unharmonious, harsh and raucous cries of our native birds such as black cockatoos, wattle birds, Australian ravens, and Kookaburras.

You better not complain about your birds! You've got some of the coolest birds on the planet flying about in your backyard airspace... The most exotic bird I get to see is the occasional Indigo Bunting. I have never even seen a Painted Bunting, and that would be closest I would ever come to a "parrot"-type bird around here. I'd probably drop my camera! But I do love the natives we have, even if their sartorial splendor doesn't stack up too high... :0)

("...gay your life must be...")

You're very right. It's anyhow the whole concert that counts. All the different sounds and colors. The thing is - for backyard chicks, to survive a dozen cats, a bunch of magpies, flemish jays, crows, in short the predators; that is an achievement. But truly, even the magpie, with the ugliest sound and a fierce chick robbing appetite, has a beautiful color pattern.

(Thank you also for new words ; 'birdly'and dissemble'. I was about to take the bum's rush.)(today's word)


So we all love our native birds; if the blackbirds will disappear I'll know where to get some.

I wasn't complaining about our native birds, just about the European birds who are displacing them. Visiting our birch tree out the front we get Green Parrots, a kind of Rosella; Butcherbirds; a Brown Falcon who likes to disembowel his prey there; and others such as Kookaburras, though they are an introduced species from the Australian mainland. The Falcon also likes to sit on the posts of the chicken run, not to attack the chickens, but the sparrows that eat the chook food. We also see Nankeen Kestrals around here and Peregrine Falcons a little further afield.
Yellow Wattle Birds visit our flowering cherry in spring and the apple tree in autumn, as do various honeyeaters.
We often see high above us the now rare wedge tailed eagle. And sometimes we run over on our roads the totally brainless native hens , who like to put their heads down like the Roadrunner and run flat out into the path of your vehicle. I once followed one at about 15 miles an hour down the road for about 50 yards before it turned off to the right onto another road, still running flat out down the centre of the road, silly thing!

...just to name a few. We are within 12 miles of the sea, so we get to see lots of marine and estuary birds as well, from Pacific gulls and Pelicans to Sooty Oyster Catchers and White Faced Herons.


How'd you know that one? I learned that in kindergarten:
"Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree-ee,
merry merry king of the bush is he-ee,
Laugh, Kookaburra laugh, Kookaburra
gay your life must be."

There were variants of course, such as
"Kookaburra sits on the telephone wire,
Jumping up and down with his pants on fire..."

Tasmania has 12 species of bird that are endemic and occur nowhere else in the world.

Okay, now with the rest of that, you're just bragging! :0)



You might not believe this, but so did I! I think many Americans know it, at least those around my age. It is used in kids' shows, especially the nature shows when they talk about the kookaburra or any australian animals. I was a little surprised that you were surprised, but how would you know? Do you know "Yankee Doodle Dandy"? I would think not, but maybe it's made its way around the world... :0)

Yup you bet. Should I list the other native birds we get to enjoy here in Tassie? Or tell you that I used to live on the mainland in an area where we had access to around one third of all Australian bird species? No, better not I guess...


Of course! Never underestimate the reach of American cultural imperialism!

Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony...etc

What you call Jackdaw = Kavka we call Kauw.I've been thinking hard on which of our birds is actually called "black" even though we have a number of them I can't find any name nearer to black than "grauw" = grey.

last word on birds

last word on words

now this sort of thing gots to be confusing to a newcomer, one being a live link and the other not.

-joe (it's all in the follow-through) friday

It's by confusion that we learn the difference between a link and an underlined set of words.

today I am the nasty one. I guess the article has still to be written.

as a child I went to a parochial (catholic) school in the bronx (a neighborhod made up of 60 to 70% immigrants (another 20% lived with grandparents who were immigrants, even if their parents had been first generation US)

the school had a Music teacher who came in once a week,
2 weeks we learned music (how to read, notes, g clef's and all sorts of technical stuff)
and 2 week a month, we learned songs.

one year (3rd grade? 4th grade?) we learned folk songs of the world--
french,(au claire du la luna) spanish (i forget) and other countries.

lots of english (many of these we knew) some scots, and some strine
wallsing matilda, and Kookaburra were 2 of them (later i learned more strine songs, like "here we are in New south Wales" )

the version i learned (below) is slightly different--but i still remember it.

the Bronx Zoo (with in walking distance of my childhood bronx home had almost NO animals from autralia.. (no, roo's, no koala's, no wombats, no birds)

so i never saw a kookaberrra till i was married, on my honeymoon and visited the hyde park zoo.

I was thrilled.. (and sang the kookaberra song) my ex (stupidly it took 20 years for that to happen,--what can i say, i am a slow learner) walked away from me.. I was so excited (childlike in my glee) he was embarassed by my reaction.

kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,
eating all the gum drops he can see,
Laugh kookaburra, laugh kookaburra,
and leave some there for me.

I thought the implication was that it could not be written - ie there IS no last word on words.

This birdbrain used to chase cars around my Mom's place. He escaped from a farm on the island and went hippie, living wild with a a couple of hens. His tail feathers reached 30 inches and the colours seem truly metallic in the sun.
When I said the pheasant had shown up my cousin, a major bird watcher, flipped and was searching for his binoculars until I pointed out that they wouldn't be needed. The bird was on our deck, pecking holes in the patio door screen.
edited to (hopefully) fix the link

Never mind kicking in the open door, I'm not nasty any more.
(kidding)

what a beautiful bird

Wow, Zed! That truly is a gorgeous bird! I've never seen even a pic of one before. I would plotz if one showed up in my yard! Unfortunate that it's a threatened species...

Last word on birds. Again.

These passerine characters visit our apple tree every day. They are Yellow Wattle Birds (anthochaera paradoxa), an Australian native honeyeater that occurs only here and on the Bass Strait islands. The yellow wattle bird is larger than the mainland red wattle bird and little wattle bird. It is about a foot long from beak to tail. They are quite an ugly bird with a harsh call but impressive looking pendulous yellow wattles hanging from their cheeks. In these shots they are eating the last of the apples. You can see their furry little honeyeater tongues in some of the shots, that they normally use for eating nectar with.

Great pix, Pook.

but, truly, an ugli bird!

Yeah it kinds of reminds me a little of the alien hunter in Predator. Though it has a much nicer disposition of course!

My next thought was a ballchinian* from Men in Black.

* Sorry, don't google this if you are easily offended.

I don't remember this from the movie but I can guess from the pseudo-etymology of the word...

True, I never said the last word about birds. This very cute specimen has entered the enclosed space of our city backyards.The Long-tailed Tit. A whole buch of them. Pretty sound they make too.

They live in groups. I read about them and they are just...I hope the Tit family will always stay.

Man, that's cute! I wish I had tits like that... ;0)

What, Long tailed or pretty sounding?

Hmmm, I'll pass on long-tailed, but pretty-sounding sounds good! Here we only have the tufted variety... nooooooooooooooo!

That bird is written Capitolized.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!

Hello there Bran: In the Netherlands, do you use a different spelling for capitalized? Here the OL ended word refers to
the building for the state government. Just curious.

I'm trying to learn my way around. Forgive me if I've gone back too far. Re: Yankee Doodle: don't forget that it was something that *we* Yanks turned back on the Brits who tried to keep *us* from breaking away. Was it not Churchill who said re: England and the USA: two countries divided by the same language. BTW, what is "real" English?

You're right, it was not Churchill. It was Mark Twain. Or either him or Oscar Wilde, one. Certainly we can't blame this one on Shakespeare.

I was OK with the language apart from a few small glitches but using slang from the wrong side of the pond occasionally meant you had quite innocently said something completely rude.

If you're inclined to prescriptivism, it's what some people have written down in books telling the world how to speak and write "real" English.
If you're inclined to descriptivism, it's what people say when they are using what they call English.
If you're a grammatical fence-sitter, it's something between those two poles.
Does that answer your question? :0)

Look at the date of the post closely and you'll find out.

Actually, no; but that is because I'm never sure which of these I'm supposed to be inclined to. When the younger theologs at Westminster Seminary Philadelphia (USA) started spouting off about their new perspectivalism, I sort of got lost. Which is objective and which is subjective? Prescriptivism or Descriptivism? It is not in my nature to be a Mugwump.

AHA! I knew someone else out there had heard of mugwumps!

Well, it may not endear the culprit to hoi polloi; but it is certainly a less uncomfortable way to straddle a fence.

mugwumps:
originally mogkiomp in the native Massachusset dialect
of the Algonquian meaning "great man", (mogki - "great", omp - "man").
So a person of status.

Little did I ever know that when my grandmother
(herself, Native American) called her dog mugwump, it was
actually a compliment to the little pooch.

I looked up this new to me word 'mugwump' and the various definitions did not make quite clear to me: does the word mean someone who can't decide which side to choose or someone who stands firm against the mainstream?

Quinion: mugwump (notice link to 'bated breath' on the right)

Hoi polloi is nominative plural. Following the preposition to it should be dative plural, tois pollois.

Following the preposition to it should be dative plural

Audite, audite!

Good site!

"Hence the old joke that a mugwump is a person sitting on the fence, with his mug on one side and his wump on the other."

So, synonimous to fence sitter. Also new to me. turncoat, turncloack. And wump is multi-interpretable I assume.

Baby talk (w for r) version of rump or backside.

Well, Latin is not my thing either. At least I did not write "the 'hoi polloi'". I can parse Hebrew and Greek; but not Latin.

There was a day in the USA when Presbyterian ministers were required to write a theological treatise in Latin as part of their trials for ordination. That expectation disappeared sometime toward the end of the 19th Century. I was required only to submit an exegetical paper on the Hebrew in a passage from the book of Isaiah; a paper on the history of the Presbyterian denomination in which I was ordained; a theological treatise in English on an assigned topic; and a written sermon on an assigned text from the New Testament; plus three oral examinations.

During my days in seminary, I was unsuccessful in persuading a professor to teach a one-year course in Latin for those of us who had not been exposed to it. My wife had two years of Latin in high school; I had two years of Spanish.

Which was exactly my problem. You should have written "the 'hoi polloi'". If you were using hoi polloi in Greek, the hoi means 'the' and should have been declined according to the correct omicron declension. Otherwise, as a phrase we have stolen from a foreign language, hoi doesn't mean 'the' and the phrase falls under the syntax rules of the English language, which requre use of the in this context.

And also on this continent.



You're a Presbyterian? For some reason I thought you were Lutheran.

Well, I did have both influences in my rearing. The grandmother in whose home I grew up was Lutheran; but she respected the affiliation of my deceased mother who was Presbyterian. You might say that I had a Reformational Ecumencial rearing.

My mother was Presbyterian because Chester, Illinois did not have a Christian Church (i.e. Disciples of Christ.) Her father was reared as a Primitive Baptist; but was theologically and socially liberal. He joined the Disciples and reared his family in it. When the family moved from Missouri to Illinois, there was no Disciples Church, therefore they joined the Presbyterian Church (from which the Disciples traced their origin.)

My grandmother was Missouri Synod Lutheran. Her husband was Methodist. He died before I was born. They lived in Ste Genevieve, MO, a Roman Catholic town. The only Protestant church was a mission supplied by ministers from the Presbyterians and the Methodists. My father became a Presbyterian because he joined the church on a day that a Presbyterian minister was present. I know. Sounds corny.

Therefore, I was raised in the Presbyterian church even after my mother's decease although my Lutheran grandmother did influence me. Maybe it's because I mentioned her Hymnal and Catechism that confused you or the fact that I went to the Lutheran School, the year after my mother's death.

But that doesn't say why *I* am Presbyterian. I was converted (that's a theological issue that I won't get into here) in a Baptistic context and in that context sensed a call to ministry. Therefore, I went to a Baptistic college. Once there, however, through my studies, I became persuaded that Presbyterianism was the most faithful of the churches to the theology and government of Biblical Protestantism.

Therefore, upon graduation from the Baptistic college, I enrolled in a Presbyterian seminary. During my third year, I served as pastor of a Bible Presbyterian CHurch in Coatesville, PA, after which I was ordained to serve as pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church of Grand Junction, CO.

Subsequent to that service, I have served churches with three different Presbyterian affiliations and now in a denomination known as the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which is one of the older Presbyterian denominations in America. It is Calvinistic or Reformed in theology and Presbyterian in government. Its ministers still subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

It was while attending the Presbyterian seminary that I became acquainted with the Rev. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee, who now resides in another of those antipode islands.

VH

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33242986@N08/3244923280/

almost had a bird picture here. Sorry. Need to keep working
on how to get it onto a thread.