Anne here, and today the wenches are talking about birds. A few weeks ago, when we were chatting on line, as we often do, we started to share bird stories, and it transpired that we were all very fond of birds. So the question we each answer today is this: What are some of your favorite birds, and where do you get to see them?
Nicola: As a child I loved the English garden birds such as the robin, which I read about in my books and saw when I visited my grandparents. We lived in the city and had a tiny garden but my grandparents lived in the countryside and were surrounded by nature. My grandfather was a keen gardener who knew all the different birds we’d find when we were outside and would point out to me the blackbirds, blue tits and sparrows. It wasn’t until I travelled abroad as an adult that I realised that birds with similar names could be quite different in other countries! I loved seeing an American Robin, for example, and was surprised how different it looked from a European one – except for the orange chest!
My dh is a keen birdwatcher and far more interested and knowledgeable than I, and when we moved to our village in Oxfordshire, we became involved with Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in species protection. It was an exciting time; we had one of the rarest birds in the UK, the Montagu’s Harrier, nesting locally. This beautiful bird of prey is very common in some other countries but not in England. For a number of years, we monitored the breeding pairs and the nests and learned so much about them. Sadly, the harriers are long gone from our area now but instead we have red kites which are also stunning birds. I love the kites, which are a successful re-introduction into the UK. In the Middle Ages they were common and would fly over towns and cities looking for scraps of food to eat. With their forked tails they were known as “devil birds.” They died out but now they are back and I enjoy seeing them up on the hills and flying over the village.
Christina: I had never paid much attention to birds until we moved to our current house out in the countryside. It has a large garden and sometimes I feel like I’m living in my very own safari park, or perhaps that should be an aviary? The birdlife here is amazing, with everything from tiny robins and sparrows, to ravens, crows and jackdaws, as well as owls, buzzards and merlins. I had never seen a raven in the wild until I moved here and I love hearing their hoarse croaking up in the trees. I also like lying in bed at night listening to the owls hooting at each other, it’s very peaceful.
My favourite birds around here though are the pheasants. They seem to mostly be around in the spring, when one or two males come strutting across our lawn, sometimes fighting for their territory with some sort of silly dance. From time to time they call out, sounding a bit like cockerels, and they always act as if they own the place. When they have established who is the king of the castle, the top male often brings his lady wife (or, on occasion, an entire harem!). The females are much more shy and blend into the background, but I like seeing them. So far I’ve never come across their young ones, but they must have them since there are new pheasants every spring.
Another favourite is the tiny goldfinch. I had never seen one of those in the wild either and I find them absolutely beautiful. The red and yellow accents really stand out and I’m so pleased they have found their way to our bird bath as they seem to be very timid. Most of the time they come in pairs or a group, which is even better. I know little birds like these are under threat these days, so it is very satisfying to watch them thrive here. Long may it continue!
Pat: Back when we had snowy winters, we’d feed the birds and loved their colorful antics. I’m not sure I can remember all of them—cardinals, gorgeous red against the white snow, titmouse creeping down the tree headfirst, all the lovely purple and gold finches. . .
We had one house surrounded by trees and woodpeckers. I loved watching them drill holes in the trees—wasn’t so fond when they did the same to the house.
Now that we’re in SoCal, we have twittering songbirds and beautiful bluebirds and orioles—so very colorful! But my favorites are the shorebirds. Watching a pelican flight is like watching dinosaurs rise up out of the sea! The enormous herons are graceful in flight and still manage to nest in the very tops of the eucalyptus trees.
There are just way too many fun birds here—the coots are tiny things that make the most awful warning noise. We have an osprey that is constantly fighting off ravens and crows. And the ravens. . .! So huge and smart—they kept the crows out of our yard for years.
We just have way too much fun following bird antics and always keep birdbaths and fountains in the yard, especially in our continuing drought.
Andrea: I love watching birds. I walk most every day down around salt water lagoons on a spit of land that juts into Long Island Sound, and love the great variety of shorebirds, like gulls, great grey herons and cormorants, as well the swallows who swoop low though the meadow grasses chasing insects as day turns to evening. Crows and ravens are also fun—they are so clever and I like watching the way they interact.
However, as a kid, I remember reading T. H. White’s Once and Future King and falling completely in love with raptors—hawks, falcons, eagles and owls (Young Arthur is turned into a merlin hawk by Merlin to teach him some life lessons.) And I still am to this day.
I’ve been lucky enough to see a peregrine falcon up close and put through its paces by a faconer in Scotland. (They are really amazing!—not a whisper of sound as they fly.) And where I walk, a bald eagle nesting pair appeared last year, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing them fly overhead. There are now two very large adolescents learning how to use their wings. It’s funny watching them wobble in the wind, learning catch their balance. I also see ospreys, often with a wiggling fish in their talons as they fly back to their nests. There’s always a daily show on the wing, and it really makes me appreciate the beauties of Nature.
Mary Jo: I grew up on a farm in Western New York and I must admit I took birds for granted. They were just there, none of them particularly spectacular: robins, starlings, English sparrows, crows, and in the barn, pigeons. In the fall, sometimes my parents would bundle us into the car to go to a swampy area half an hour or so west, which was a major flyway for migrating geese. I admit that seeing and hearing several thousand geese was pretty cool. <G>
I didn't really consciously bird watch until I spent two years in Oxford, England. We put birdseed feeders on the balcony and watched the show. I loved the English robins, much smaller and classier than the American variety, who are just thrushes, I was told. I was particularly fond of the blue tits, partly because of the name <g>, but also because they were such adorable tiny acrobats. Great fun to watch!
But for special fun birds, penguins rock! They are well dressed comedians on the land, and sleek, elegant swimmers in the water. Of course one doesn't see penguins just anywhere, but we did an Antarctic cruise several years ago. We had a stop in the Falklands, and PENGUINS! Now, of course, I want to see them again. <G>
Susan: We have plenty of bird visitors to the yard and lots of birds residing in our pines and maple trees. I'm not much good at identifying them, but we regularly see cardinals, blue jays, finches, sparrows, robins, hawks, and more. At the moment we have a very large, very loud crow who likes to sit early in the morning at the top of the tallest tree on our hill (giving him a high perch indeed) and shriek at everything he sees--including me, trying to have an early, quiet moment on the deck with a cup of tea and a pad of paper to scribble some writing.
Last spring we had a pesky, noisy redheaded woodpecker who took a liking to a picturesque tree stump in the yard that was surrounded by flowers and made a pretty seat for a little fairy statue. He absolutely decimated the stump over a matter of days, toppled the fairy, and made a big mess and a lot of noise. He enjoyed it until we had the stump removed. The woodpecker then took a liking to a neighbor's tree and went to work over there.
By far the most fun I've had with birds involved some hands-on research in falconry for some of my medievals, including Laird of the Wind. Years ago I had the pleasure of spending hours at the British School of Falconry in Vermont handling a Harris Hawk, flying him around and attempting to call him back to me (I was not the tallest thing in the field, so he wouldn't come to me until the other people in the group moved away).
Then I had the rare privilege of meeting a goshawk owned by a local trainer who invited me to his house to spend hours observing and learning about that beautiful bird. He inspired a key character in Laird of the Wind--the beautiful, obstinate, challenging goshawk that the hero trains. Field research is just the best!
Anne again and no doubt I'll be sharing birds that are as exotic to you as birds like woodpeckers, blue tits, cardinals and so on are to me. As a child, I fell in love with English robins when reading The Secret Garden, and I recall one time when I visited Mary Jo and saw hummingbirds feeding from the flowers in her hanging baskets. I'd loved the idea of them since I was a little girl, but I'd never seen one until that day. And woodpeckers were cartoon creatures, as were roadrunners - both yet to be seen by me in the flesh.
For me, one of the best sounds to wake up to in the morning is the sound of one or more magpies singing. It's a joyous-sounding almost choral effect. Australian magpies are quite different to European magpies — they're larger and their only similarity is that both birds are black and white. Friends of mine feed them, and will sometimes have up to twenty magpies visiting their inner city tiny garden. You can watch and listen to a magpie singing here.
My other favorite bird sound in the morning is that of rainbow lorikeets chittering and chirruping and squawking in trees like flowering gums or some other nectar-bearing native plant. Many people will be familiar with them as colorful cage birds — they can be real characters — but here they are wild, and swoop around the sky in small flocks, even in the inner city where I live. Here is a short video of wild rainbow lorikeets enjoying a spontaneous bath in a woman's lunchbox. And if you're interested here's another video of a couple of wild rainbow lorikeets that have obviously trained humans to feed them on demand — and demanding these little ones certainly are.
Other native birds I love are the tiny, cheeky blue wrens (pic on the right) kookaburras, owls, little fairy penguins (which are a tourist attraction in my state) — and oh, the list goes on. I'm also very fond of tawny frogmouths which are possibly one of the ugliest birds — they look like a scruffy pile of bark, which is brilliant camouflage. I often see a tawny frogmouth family — two parents with a young one in between them — sitting high up in one of the gum trees in a local park a couple of blocks from my home.
Now it's over to you, wenchly readers — Are you a bird lover? What birds do you see in your local area? Do you have any favorites? Tell us about them.