For once, I am writing this post ‘live’. My normal practice is to share from my stock of ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’. But I must confess, with the limitations of lockdown living, there seems little opportunity to get inspired and my stock of pre-written posts is running dangerously low.
So today I have decided instead to take the plunge and write and publish with no delay. My content – writing about the one activity we have been able to carry out without constraint over the past year – ringing birds in our garden. Just in case, this sounds somewhat dubious, here’s a bit of an explainer of what this means: “bird ringing generates information on the survival, productivity and movements of birds, helping us to understand why populations are changing.” So I can confirm bird ringing is definitely a Good Thing.
Below is a small selection of the 350+ different birds that have come to visit us over the past eight months. In order to speed up identification and discussion of the birds, in addition to recording the ring number (and important ‘bio data’), each bird is given a name. This was my particular task and I decided to use the ‘characteristics’ of each species to determine what approach to take to naming.
Here is a long-tailed tit, inspired by Beatrix Potter characters.
And here is a male greater spotted woodpecker, acknowledging its sylvian habitat.
And this is a male chaffinch, a rather refined and polite bird, like something from Jane Austen.
Blue tits are very hard to sex outside of the nesting season, so we had to go for a bi name but which picked up on this species’ cockney, cheeky aspects.
And finally, here is a jackdaw, the bullies and bosses of the pack, perhaps mafiosi?!