Wednesday 14 April 2021

Unstuffed Birds


Green Woodpecker

Cuckoo and Reed Warbler

Here are a few more of what I have come to think of as "unstuffed birds"; that is, museum specimens given a new life in a new context, some more convincingly than others.

While making these, I have been driven slightly mad by a thrush somewhere out beyond our back garden, endlessly and loudly "singing" its limited repertoire of tweets and twiddles, morning to night. "I'm a thrush! I'm a thrush! You're not a thrush! Are you? Are you? No, you're not a thrush! 'Course you're not a thrush! I'm a thrush! I'm a thrush! ... [da capo]" I believe some of the other local birds have clubbed together to hire a sparrow hawk to take the noisy bastard out.

Cormorant

Sedge Warblers


3 comments:

Kent Wiley said...

Ha ha. Funny entry.

Meanwhile, in case you can't get enough bird watching, you might dip into these bird cam views I've become slightly obsessed with. This one's an eagle cam in northwest Florida. Actually four cams on the same nest. The youngster is about ready to fledge and make a break from the parental units. And this one is an osprey nest with one chick hatched and two eggs still incubating.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Now that really is slow TV...

Have you come across Stephen Gill's book "The Pillar", automatic photos triggered by birds landing on a post in Sweden? I'm ambivalent about it, but it has been very well received by reviewers and won a number of prizes, so what do I know?

Mike

Zouk Delors said...

Thanks to Kent, I am totally hooked on the eagle cam. Just had to break off commenting then as the chick decided to munch a bit more on the fish that must have been dropped in the nest earlier, before I started watching again. I've got the cam feed on screen-in-screen so I can keep an eye on it while I do other things. I really hope I'm watching when it starts branching.

The Pillar is a fascinating project too. How brilliant of him to realize that birds would want to perch on an isolated post like that. Obvious when you think about it, really.

Thanks, both.