let's hear it for the sparrow

On Voting For A National Bird 

Though there’s a case to choose the robin-
Gaudy-coated, territorial,
Thuggish, pushy, rival-mobbing,
Here-we, here-we, here-we-gorial,
Argumentative and narrow-
Give me, instead, the humbler sparrow
Whose virtues are too long to list
And from the poll is sadly missed.

Britain needs a national bird, apparently. Here's where you can vote. The sparrow's not the only bird missing from the list; the Kentucky Fried Chicken is absent, too, its remains probably scattered around some distant lay-by. I particularly like lapwings and curlews, but I prefer to leave them well alone, just as I'm sure they'd prefer to be left alone. Can't really see either of them stepping happily into the limelight, winning contestants on Britain's Got Talon. Which bird, gentle reader, would you go for?

Alton Barnes White Horse

Here's the finished picture that I showed in the earlier stages in my previous blog post. The Alton Barnes white horse looks out over the Vale of Pewsey, which is a lovely, wide open place where you can sit up on the Down and gaze over to Salisbury Plain and imagine the far distant past, in between admiring the evolutions of the huge jet fighters that occasionally wheel over the Plain, and the distant rumble of artillery.

I had a paint crisis on Saturday, when I put on a wash for the sky, and it went horrible. I use Daler Rowney hot-pressed paper, because it is really smooth and allows me to paint very fine detail. But the flip side is that it won't suck up huge amounts of paint. So I did a quick dash to Bristol (Wiltshire seems a bit deficient in art supply shops) and picked up some gouache from Harold Hockey's. The sky is painted with Winsor and Newton's Permanent White, which is their most opaque; and Brilliant Blue mixed in with it. 

chiffchaff

summer wind
a sparrow re-rights itself
at the peanut cage

Alan Summers

I did this pic to accompany Alan's haiku, for one of the events he's organising in Bath. You can find out more if you follow the link above...

This morning I was sure that I heard a chiffchaff as I wandered around making my first cup of tea. So I took the tea and sat at the open window in the front room.

I heard:

a green woodpecker
wood pigeons
a wren
blackbirds
robins
blue tits
greenfinches
goldfinches
a starling
...and the chiffchaff.

I spotted it a few times, as it flitted from tree to tree; it landed in the plane tree outside the house, the tree that the magpies nested in last year; and gave a burst of song, then came to a branch very close to the window.

I kept perfectly still.

But it decided not to risk it anyway, and bobbed off to the next tree.

At one of my early morning wildlife-related meet-ups at the Downs cafe with Geraldine, Keith and Nick, recently, I met Myles Lucas, who was looking into why birdwatchers watch birds. My explanation was, or would be, something along the lines of 'because they are wild creatures whose space overlaps with ours, and it's interesting to get to know their characters and habits'. There is a lot of wildness going on close by, and it's just as wild as what you see on an African safari (and less likely to eat you too...). And the more you look, the more you see.