Friday, March 27, 2009
Yesterday was the day that all the passage birds came through my patch, and it will continue again today. The fly through Osprey, the Boney knocking about with the last of the Black Heads, the first singing Chiffchaff and of course the over shot Hoopoe. I know this will have happened because I didn't get out yesterday and nor will I today (thanks to the supervision of the removal of an RSJ yesterdayand a bidness lunch today).
So instead of an idiosynchratic take on what I have seen in the last 24 hours, have some pictures of a Heron from earlier in the week. My field craft was so awesome in my approach to this one, that I totally freaked out a bloke reading the paper in a quiet spot that he thought I was a wierd stalker and promptly upped sticks and farked orph.
They have been taken with my perhaps unique technique of Digi-monocularising™, or Digimonning™. This technique involves sticking the camera at the end of a monocular and taking two hundred photos in the hope that one is half decent.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Mrs Thing and I took a trip to the Natural History Museum on Saturday and it was bloody brilliant. Mostly.
The thing that stayed with me the most was that the Dodo was fucking huge! Huge! No shit - it's no wonder this bird went in the pot - it was made for it. All these years, I havent actually thought about the size of it - so often it appears in books and is usually described as being related to a pigeon but being larger - but I had no idea that it was over 3 foot tall! The beak on it was enormous - if this bird actually had any aggressive tendencies, it would have ripped sailors' arses off with one peck if they came close. But it didn't. So the rest is history. Literally.
The rest of the bird room was on the one hand fascinating, and utter, utter shite. The amount of birds on display was great, and some of the more outlandish species was interesting, but many of the stuffed birds are a long way from realistic plumage, and some of them are just plain manky.
If you happen to go one day, and the Darwin exhibition is sold out (as it was on Saturday), I assume that you will take a bee(eater?)line for the bird room. If you do, check out the Spoonbill. It has turned into a horrible bug eyed freak that resembles only vaguely the gorgeous bird that you see in the field. If I happened to see such a freako-monster in the field, I'd feel guilty at looking at it. Just one example of many.
However, in the same case as the mangy spoonbill, there was a Hoopoe and I showed it to Mrs Thing and gave a little advance notice, that should an easy one hang around this year, we would be off to see it in a trice and it was greeted with a suprised "We get them? Here?". Cracking, so we left the room and headed off to see the blue whale while I did my fantastic, and stunningly realistic Hoopoe impression...
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Found a Chiffchaff on the North Bank this morning. Was checking out some ducks flying over (Mallard of course) when an LBJ flew across the river and landed in a Buddleia. Tried to get some photos, but due to the light conditions and the rain (note - rain - not snow) I just ended up with some dark shots of a dead bush. With a Chiffchaff shaped smudge in the middle. Even by my standards they are utter shite.
Bizarrely, a Hoopoe was reported in Frensham yesterday (via Surrey Birders). WTF? A Hoopoe in the middle of winter - how lost must that bird be?
