Here’s a butterfly that alighted on Saturday on the wall above the cranberry crabapple bush, malus sargentii. This proves that taking pictures that are sharply in focus isn’t impossible for me or my camera. But I can’t do it with birds. I was inspired by some lovely photographs of the birds of Argentina that Julia sent me (I’d display one but I can’t extract them from Powerpoint). So here are some fuzzy pictures of Norwegian birds in the field by our house. I don’t know what this one is (hopeless), but there’s a pair of them and they are always hanging around this bit of fence by the road:
and here’s an even more blurry one. Does anyone know what sort they are?
Here are some crows. At least I can recognise crows, even if I can’t get close to them.
Crows are my favourite bird.
We’ll soon be in the part of late autumn when great flocks of them sit in the trees at dusk; hundreds, this year welcoming the bats to their new homes.
A Bad Guide 
The species is bokfink (Fringilla cœlebs). WP tells me that’s Chaffinch in English. Probably still analphabets over there.
Lovely crows, butterfly and that blurry fellow.
Let’s try if you can all see the birds’ pictures Crown mentions in this post, here.
(These pictures were taken by professional photographers, we shouldn’t compare our skills with them…)
So that’s a chaffinch! Thanks. Or a bokfink.
No, I’m not planning on turning pro. But Julia, your husband’s bird pictures, they’re very sharp. I probably just need to use the tripod (my hands have always been very shaky).
But you are aware these pictures from the powerpoint aren’t my husband’s, aren’t you? (or I should say “don’t you”)
I don’t think it’s a problem of shaky hands: you need to adjust the velocity, the light and the points of focus of your camera… Diego would explain it better. I’ll ask him to do it (in wife’s language, that means “I’ll command him to do it”, as you may know ;-)
Yes, I know he didn’t take those ones. It’s ok, don’t trouble Diego, my wife’s pretty good with photography so I can always ask her. I probably just need to use a faster speed.
Yes a faster speed is very important. And be sure to know where are your points of focus.
To make a bird stood still in front of a tripod would always be more difficult that these adjustments…
(crabapple, not cranberry)
I forgot what camera you have (and I’m lazy), but all my crappy digital cameras have had a “sports” setting that is really just for things that move fast (even the landscape, if taken from a moving vehicle). It is shown by a glyph for the illiterate, or not-polyglot-enough – sometimes it seems to be a golfer (not the fastest moving of sportsmen…). Wander around your menu. My problem with butterflies is, when one is visible and still, by the time I’ve got the camera out of my pocket (with the dog tugging at the lead in my other hand) the butterfly has flown. Sigh. I’ve never seen two-tone crows before. Somebody (in Belgium, I think) once showed me some two-tone blackish cawing birds and said they were jackdaws. This interested me because jackdaws feature in The Borrowers…
crabapple, not cranberry
Thank you. I need a sports setting.
It’s a Canon 5d, a really good camera. I’m sure the trick is inside somewhere. I know the focusing procedure, and I’ve tried banging it against a rock. It says here that the grey-and-black type is called a hooded crow in Britain. That’s the only kind I ever see here. I don’t remember jackdaws in The Borrowers, though I saw some in Richmond the last time I was in London.
Mr Crown we have the same crows in Moscow, which are also called Danish, Scotch, or Corbie crows. I think “real” crows are all black. Our most exciting birds are the jays, which scream and dive bomb the dogs. They are very big and pretty, but noisy.
The jackdaws don’t really appear – they nest in the chimney of the old rectory (if that’s what it is) where the Borrowers settle inside the window-seat formerly occupied by Peagreen. Pod builds Homily a kitchen in a disused fireplace, and firewood is supplied by the jackdaws’ poor nest-building techniques. IIRC…
Corbie crows
I think corbeau is raven in French, isn’t it? They have the grey crows in Scotland I saw on that site above (and I expect in Danmark). How great to have the jays dive bombing. We’re scared the eagles or hawks are going to take Alex the Yorkshire terrier. A couple of time our hens lay on their backs and played dead when there was a hawk overhead (that’s what they do, jolly funny to watch).
Thanks, Catanea. It’s been nearly fifty years since I read it.
My younger daughter turns 25 today. So it’s only been somethingteen years since I read it most recently (or heard it read).
You haven’t read it to Alma?
After The Borrowers there’s The Borrowers Afield, + …Afloat, …Aloft, and …Avenged. [Pity I don’t have one of those squiggles dictionaries use to mean “repeat headword”.] We have them all in one volume.
And now I see there are some apocryphal addenda I haven’t read! I’ll have to hunt for them!
Dunno about the new Japanese movie, though…
Have you saw the storks at Catanea’s blog? Go, quickly!
Oh, look at that! So modest. Those are real bird pictures. Beautiful.
I ought to have read The Borrowers to Alma, I’ve no idea why it never happened. Happy birthday to your younger daughter!
Thank-you. There are more photos and more movies; but it takes forever to upload. And K now tells me he can zoom in on movies in “post production” so I hope he can make closer shots of moving storks than I and my puny Sony could en el acto. Storks, like rainbows, recede as you approach them.
Catan(n)ea, thank you for the storking. What a moment for you, to see them standing there!
I agree with mab. The crows around here are plain black, and I can’t feeling that any crow who goes about with all that gray plumage is either putting on airs or maybe dressed for Halloween. But according to WiPe, there are two widespread European crows, the carrion crow and the hoodie, very closely related to each other — the one plain black like the (different) ones mab I grew up with, the other part gray. If you look at the maps, you see that the hoodies predominate in northern Britain and in Scandinavia, also around Moscow.
In my experience, crows are loud and gregarious. They have a reputation for intelligence. I enjoy it when they come around, except when they choose to have one of their big treetop convocations right outside our house too early in the morning.
Crows and ravens and magpies and jays are all in the family Corvidae, and the crows and ravens (Corvus corax) are in the genus Corvus. The words crow, corvus, corax, crake, rook, raven, are all apparently related, and originally refer to the sounds they make. Croak.
“Jay” seems to be a loose term. The blue jays that we have here are no more shy than crows, but one site that I saw for British bird-watchers described them as reclusive forest creatures, hard to spot.
We used to have a jay who lived in the elm tree outside the kitchen window where I grew up in the centre of London, so they aren’t that reclusive.
Kråke is the Norwegian word for crow.
It’s not just a reputation, they are really intelligent, and in such interesting ways. I wish I could find a video of Bertil the Swedish crow they used to have in children’s tv here. But I can’t. And in the meantime there’s always the David Attenborough thing with Japanese crows cracking walnuts.
In upstate NY where I grew up, we had blue jays, who were loud and pushy and usually cleared the bird feeder of little robins and wrens. The jays around Moscow are much bigger, with bits of orange and white on them, but just as pushy and noisy. I’ve heard of hawks taking off pets; would love to see your chickens playing dead.
To switch elements, when diving in the Red Sea, you are told that if you see a large, lone baracuda, you’re supposed to lie on the sand and pretend you are a flounder.
Oh, BTW, in Russian raven is voron and crow is vorona. Very confusing at first.
Some hawks won’t eat things found dead. The ones that will are sometimes called buzzards in the US.
Some hawks won’t even go for prey that is running on the ground; they specialize in snatching birds in flight. The ones that will are sometimes called buzzards in the UK.
In England there’s Leighton Buzzard. As a child I was priggishly glad not to live in a place with such a predatory-sounding name.
Voron & Vorona. The hard part is remembering which is which. I’m glad to know all these names for the crow family.
I was inspired by some lovely photographs of the birds of Argentina that Julia sent me (I’d display one but I can’t extract them from Powerpoint).
Do you have the PowerPoint editing software, or only a “viewer” ? It’s easy to extract an image from a presentation using the editing software: right-click on the image to get the context menu, then “save as graphics file”.
I downloaded the PowerPoint viewer, and found no context menu to save the image. But I was able to save the image in PDF form, then extract it from there using the Adobe Reader (Print, “direct output to file” or whatever it’s called in English).
So with the Viewer and Reader you should be able to extract images.
Stu, thank you for this. I’ll refer to it next time I have Powerpoint trouble. I do have Powerpoint, but I never use it.
In German, that’s a Nebelkrähe (crow of the fog).
Here in Nova Scotia I always have one or two pairs of bluejays in my back yard in the spring. They are mostly light grey with light mauvy-blue wings, with some white and a touch of black on their heads, and they are not shy at all: if you are having a picnic, they will come perch on the table and snatch food it you are not careful. They are found through most of Canada, and they are called “whiskeyjacks”, not that they like whisky but the name is adapted from one of the native languages.
Out on the Northern West Coast there is a different type of jay, referred to as ‘bluejay’, more beautiful and also more shy. This jay has very dark but shimmery feathers, kind of a midnight blue with dark green highlights, and the head and the top of the body are shiny black. It must be a variety of Steller’s Jay, which is pictured on Wikipedia as much more definitely blue, but I have only seen the very dark ones, flitting among trees in the forest.
In the same area there are also huge ravens, impossible to confuse with crows.
The ravens I’ve seen at the Tower of London are absolutely enormous, not to be confused with crows, which are only as big as hens.
Dyveke (my wife) tells me that in Norway birds like blackbirds and starlings, that in Britain would overwinter, migrate south. I hadn’t thought of it until now. Do the Canadian ones move southwards too?
I’ll look up Nebelkrähe. it sounds wintery.
“Nebel” is a great word. So is “raven”.
From German Wiki:
Die Nebelkrähe (Corvus corone cornix) gehört zur Familie der Rabenvögel (Corvidae). Die Nebelkrähe wird je nach Lehrmeinung als Unterart der Aaskrähe (Corvus corone, dann Corvus corone cornix) oder als eigenständige Art (Corvus cornix) angesehen.
So I guess either it’s a subspecies of your familiar hoodie or not, depending who you ask.
The expression je nach Lehrmeinung – or similar ones containing Lehrmeinung – makes my feet hurt when I try to render it in English with a minimum of expansive circumlocution. Basically it means just “depending on who you ask”, but more precisely it means here “depending on the taxonomic system in question”. “Literally” the expression means “depending on the learned opinion (that you consult)”.
You and Trond both seem to translate with your feet. Interesting.
I believe that our red-winged blackbirds migrate. By the way, the Wiki article has the striking sentence:
“However, in vast majority of the other Ojibwa language dialects, the bird is called memiskondinimaanganeshiinh, literally meaning “a bird with a very red damn-little shoulder-blade.” “
On the other hand, I see that what you call a blackbird over there is in the thrush family, so not the same thing at all.
I got the meaning of Lehrmeinung right, but I didn’t read the thing carefully enough: It says that the Nebelkrähe is your local hooded crow, but it also says that the hooded crow is, depending on who you ask, either a subspecies of the widespread all-black European crow (a.k.a. carrion crow) or a separate species.
damn tags, no preview, grumble
Our male blackbirds – I mean English ones – are black with yellow beaks. I think the females are brown, I’ve forgotten. But now I see in the Wikipedia article that they’re all a tatty brownish colour.
I can’t believe the Nebelkrähe is anything other than a descendant of the Carrion crow, in fact it just looks like a Carrion crow with ruffled feathers (due to the wind).
Grumbly: Lehrmeinung – using the 30-words-for-snow line of questioning, I’d like to know why German has so many words for ‘expert opinion’? When I lived in Hamburg, we used to take part in invited competitions against other architects to design a building. That type of competition was called a Gutachten, it was also supposed to mean ‘expert opinion’.
From Ø’s link to the red-winged blackbird I moved on to Sexual Dimorphism – males & females of the same species that look different – and the following sentence:
AJP: migrating birds: In the spring we are plagues by starlings (an introduced species), which are absent in the winter, so I suppose they migrate from somewhere. They nest in the strangest places. At one time I lived in the country and had an old mailbox (next to the road) which did not close very tightly, and after puzzling over why bits of hay kept appearing in it even though I removed them, I discovered that I had a nest of starlings. I did not want to destroy the eggs or the babies, but they made an awful mess. More recently, there have been starlings in a vent in one of my walls. I had a “cage” put on over the opening to prevent birds from entering, but they pecked it out. I hope the new one I had to put in this year will withstand them next spring, but I am not really optimistic.
The reproductive drive is one of the strongest forces in nature. It falls under Bergson’s élan vital, but would be more accurately described as élan implacable. Even apart from that, though, starlings are not equipped with faculties to do anything but eat and mate. If you blocked their nesting places and placed a Scrabble board nearby, they won’t say to themselves: “OK, let’s play Scrabble until marie-lucie moves house and we can get back to business”.
That type of competition was called a Gutachten, it was also supposed to mean ‘expert opinion’.
I suspect you are misremembering something here. A competition is a Wettbewerb. The formal evaluations of each submission that the competition jury produces would be the Gutachten. A Gutachten is a printed document containing an evaluation of something by someone competent to produce such an evaluation. Its purpose is to serve as evidence in support of a decision, especially in administrative matters or in a court trial.
Usually the competence is assumed to follow from possession of relevant professional qualifications – as, say, when a judge orders a certified psychologist to prepare a psychological evaluation (psychologisches Gutachten) on competence to stand trial. A municipal housing authority can commission an engineer to produce an assesment of the structural integrity of a building (baustatisches Gutachten).
My God, how pedantic I can be ! What I really want to say is that if you encounter the noun Gutachten in German texts more often than any other noun in English texts on the same subject, that is probably because Germans love nouns. When you look at both verbs and nouns in the English texts, you will find equivalent phrasings that have simply not accreted into nouns.
Having searched the internet for “trial psychological opinion”, I found an AAPL Practice Guideline for the Forensic Psychiatric Evaluation of Competence to Stand Trial. It contains a useful suggestion as to how women can get men to answer questions about their “feelings”:
Anglo-American legal doctrine concerning competence to stand trial extends back at least as far as the mid-17th century in England.6 According to some commentators, the requirement for mental competence originally arose in English courts as a reaction to those defendants who, rather than enter a plea of guilt or innocence, stood mute. In such cases, courts impaneled juries to decide whether the accused was “obstinately mute, or whether he be dumb ex visitatione Dei [by visitation of God]” (Ref. 7, Book 4, Chap 25, p 477). Those defendants found “obstinately mute” were subjected to peine forte et dure, a procedure (continued, albeit rarely, as late as the 18th century) in which increasingly heavy weights were placed on the defendant’s chest until he responded or died.7,8 Defendants found mute ex visitatione Dei, however, were spared this ordeal. This category originally referred to individuals who were literally deaf and mute, but over time, it came to include persons with mental illness.
they won’t say to themselves: “OK, let’s play Scrabble”
I’m not so sure, Stu. This purports to be “a recording of a starling scrabbling about”.
I just knew I should have given poker as an example, instead of Scrabble. But that article implies that starlings cheat at Scrabble:
The starling is also an excellent mimic and will incorporate the calls of other birds such as curlew, chickens, and even car alarms into its song!
That sounds like those players who try to sneak in neologisms for big points.
I bet that the weight-procedure is only one kind of peine forte et dure, and that the quoted sentence should have been formulated as “were subjected to a form of peine forte et dure. In the present case, this was a procedure …”
No, Stu, there’s no stopping me. If you had said “poker” I would have found a site that describes them as poking holes in the ground. By the way, the WiPe article says that they have a special technique for enlarging such holes:
Many species search for prey such as grubs by “open-bill probing”, that is, forcefully opening the bill after inserting it into a crevice, thus expanding the hole and exposing the prey; this behavior is referred to by the German verb “zirkeln”.
One could leave a straightedge and compass for them to play with, and watch them try in vain to trisect an angle.
I gather that one reason for submitting to this panforte E-dur treatment (allowing oneself to be crushed to death instead of pleading either guilty or not guilty and being executed later by, say, hanging) is that in certain cases this allowed your estate to pass to your heirs rather than being seized by the Crown.
The Crown can seize hairs if it wants to, though, for instance when the goats need shearing.
Starlings are on to something a lot more fun than Scrabble, Stu.
I remember the word Wettbewerb, we used that too. The city bureaucracy of Hamburg – they set up these Gutachten thingies – must have just taken over the word for their own purposes. We were always four firms of architects who were paid to present a proposal (site plan & other drawings, Erläuterungstext, square-footage breakdown and a model) for a new building, usually an office building. The schemes were judged by some important architects from the city planning office and the Bauherr (developer). The winner got to build their proposal, and it was by winning one with my German (business) partner, when we both were living in New York, that I landed in Hamburg for three years.
Now I come to think of it, we did a Gutachten for how to redevelop the former Schlachthoff in Schwerin, so they weren’t confined to Hamburg.
Last month my wife and I saw swallows behaving a lot like the starlings in the video that AJP linked to. We were paddling along in a couple of kayaks near some tidal marshes, and the swallows were swooping now over the land, now over the water. At the same time that the main multitude of tiny specks were following and leading each other and combining and recombining in the distance in this aerial-school-of-fish way, we would see hundreds or thousands of individuals right down near us skimming low over the water, apparently taking a little time out from the great dance to eat some insects. I wish we had had a video camera. We wondered how many zillions of birds we were seeing.
We also wondered whether this routine is a preparation for mass migration. Practicing flying in a group? Building up strength? Training the young ones for their first big flight? It’s something we’ve long associated with late summer or early fall, though we’ve never seen it from such a perfect vantage point before.
We al
Many species search for prey such as grubs by “open-bill probing”, that is, forcefully opening the bill after inserting it into a crevice, thus expanding the hole
That must be the technique the starlings used to make the plastic “cage” over the vent useless, so they could nest inside.
m-l, Every winter the snow dislodges about ten roof-tiles from the out house. It’s a race to replace them before a pair of birds has taken the opportunity to set up a nest in one of the holes. Not that I mind, there’s a waterproof surface underneath, but after a few weeks it will become so hot during the daytime that the birds will have to abandon their eggs.
La Houlotte, which I used to subscribe to and must re-join, speaking of swallows, suggested placing a bale of hay on rooftops under which birds had nested, to keep the nestlings cool.
I’ll try that. The best thing is to get them to nest elsewhere, there are some seemingly ideal locations nearby.