Trip reports
Record Breaking Birds - Biggest? Fastest? Laziest
Friday, 12 December 2008
He looked at several birds starting with the House Sparrow. Consistently in the top birds in the Big Garden Birdwatch" in Wales. In Romania, to stop sparrows eating your newly sown field, keep a seed under your tongue whilst sowing! In Bohemia you can prevent sparrows eating your stored grain by putting the splinter from a coffin in front of the door. That or a bone from a grave.
The black winged stilt has the longest legs in proportion to it's body. The swift has the shortest at about 12mm.
Birds feature in Shakespeare. "Far from her nest the lapwing cries away" - A Comedy of Errors - shows how the bird will pretend a damaged wing to attract a predator away from the nest making most noise furthest away from the nest. Or in Hamlet - "This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head." - refers to the belief that the hatchling emerges with half the shell on it's head.
The goose also features in Hamlet - "Men wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills" - the pen is mightier than the sword.
The great spotted woodpecker has the very short incubation period of 12 days. The cuckoo doesn't incubate at all, it leaves that chore to the unwitting host.
The cuckoo features in a rhyme:
"Cuckoo, cuckoo, cherry-tree,
Good bird, prithee, tell to me
How many years I am to see."
The answer is made by the cuckoo repeating its cry the prophetic number of times. All provided it has eaten three good meals of cherries of course.
This was an eclectic mixture of facts and beliefs which everyone enjoyed and provided the ideal end to the 2008 season enjoyed by all there.