Was Beethoven a Birdwatcher
My Summary
Highlights
which are more likely to be found in British gardens by the eagle-eyed (or sparrowhawk-eyed even) than any other raptor — location: 855
Actually in the garden, maybe, but not from the garden!
She goes after starlings, blackbirds and even woodpigeons — location: 860
Female hunts bigger prey
The male contents himself with lesser birds like the chaffinch and Great Tit, — location: 859
Males go afterd smaller prey
allowing them to fill two ecological niches at the same time. — location: 861
the musket, an early type of gun, is named after an old moniker for the male sparrowhawk. — location: 866
But does this affect the populations of the small birds that cats kill? This may sound a silly question, but it’s not clear that they do, at least in the long term. — location: 872
On cats killing birds
because cats catch so many small birds, other predators such as the sparrowhawk lose out. — location: 878
So if there were fewer than eight million cats in Britain, there would probably be more than the current 40,000 pairs of sparrowhawks. — location: 880
Hawks bear the family name Accipiter, after the Latin for ‘to seize’, — location: 888
but the sparrowhawk’s species name, Nisus, is even more intriguing. Nisus, — location: 888
the sparrowhawk’s species name, Nisus, is even more intriguing. Nisus, king of Megara, was turned into a bird of prey after the city was betrayed by his daughter Scylla. What happened to Scylla, you might ask? She was turned into a lark, condemned for ever to fly around in fear of her father. Revenge is a dish best served for eternity. — location: 888
Athene noctua – night-time Athene. — location: 896
Latin name for little owl.
it was a symbol of Athene, Greek goddess of wisdom, — location: 895
This is where the little owl gets its latin name
By the 1920s it had become firmly established, — location: 909
Why was there such a fixation with establishing the Little Owl in England? It was probably its association with Athene, at a time when most educated people still felt that the Ancient Greeks represented the pinnacle of civilisation. — location: 912
The verb ‘ululate’ – to wail or lament loudly – comes from an Ancient Roman word for owl, Ulula. — location: 927
1668 Birds, Butterflies and a Frog among Plants and Fungi. — location: 941
in the early 1800s, this suddenly changed. A small group of artists emerged who had the knack for painting live birds that actually looked like live birds — location: 947
the gigantic Haast’s Eagle of New Zealand – bigger than any bird of prey that still exists – which became extinct in about 1400 after its main prey, the giant, wingless moa, died out and there was nothing large enough left to satisfy its enormous appetite. — location: 1008
James Bond himself was named after an expert in that most uncool of male pursuits: birdwatching. — location: 1029
The original James Bond was a professional ornithologist and author of Birds of the West Indies – a tome kept by Fleming at Goldeneye. — location: 1030
Suddenly the intriguing scene where the Roger Moore version of Bond identifies a Lepidoptera specimen that M is studying seems strangely explicable. — location: 1032
film Die Another Day, where the fictional James Bond is studying the real James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies — location: 1034
the British government decided in 2005 to exterminate the species in Britain, many nature lovers were appalled – and were even more shocked that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) had decided to cooperate. — location: 1067
Ruddy Ducks are actually not British at all but American. Imported to grace wildfowl collections, — location: 1072
many were wooing the local señoritas (or señors) in Spain: White-Headed Ducks, a separate but similar species that is globally endangered — location: 1074
Ruddy Ducks threatened to reduce White-Headed Duck numbers by hybridising with them — location: 1076
Ring-Necked Parakeet – another species introduced to Britain, this time from Africa and Asia – has shown an astonishing rise, growing by 700 per cent since 1995. Some conservationists have blamed it for a fall in Lesser Spotted Woodpecker numbers, arguing that the two species compete for suitable nesting sites. — location: 1086
The British army had already acknowledged the capability of this bird in the nineteenth century, by introducing what it called ‘snipers’ — location: 1110
This was a borrowed word – it had been invented in the previous century as a term of praise for hunters good enough to kill snipe. — location: 1111
As a result, the surname Woodcock was originally a term of insult for a stupid person. — location: 1128
the principle of Occam’s razor – that we should generally accept the theory with the lowest necessary number of assumptions. — location: 1204
such as Julie-the-bogs, Old Nog and Frank, gradually disappeared. — location: 1243
In 1889 a group of well-to-do women gathered in Didsbury, a Manchester suburb, in an effort to stop the use of birds in fashion. Motivated largely by the persecutions in particular of the Great Crested Grebe and the kittiwake, a gull with an onomatopoeic name, they formed what was first called The Plumage League and later became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds — location: 1275
RSPB was founded by a group of woemn
Mass Observation — location: 1283
Enomoto Kikaku caught the cranes’ manner perfectly, reflecting: On New Year’s dawn
Sedately, the cranes
Pace up and down — location: 1338
‘look how beautiful I am’ expression. The seventeenth-century Japanese haiku — location: 1338
‘There they come, the birds of my youth,’ he said, looking up at the sky. One of the birds broke away from the group to circle above his home, as if acknowledging him. Two days later he died. — location: 1347
Jean sibelius two days before His death
The Red Grouse is now considered merely the endemic British version of the globally widespread Willow Grouse, so — location: 1396
The Glorious Twelfth was the time to head up to the grouse moors of Scotland, because that was when the shooting season started. — location: 1402
cultures. A European legend mentioned by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle recounts a contest to decide who would hold this title. It was decided that the most fitting way was to pick the bird that could fly the highest. The eagle appeared to be a dead cert, but the tiny wren was hiding in its plumage, and jumped out to fly a little higher and clinch the title just when the eagle had reached its zenith. So the wren won by opposing power with guile. — location: 1990
Aristotle, the first great scholar to write down his thoughts on birds, could count 140 in the fourth century bc. — location: 2015
Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century Hampshire parson regarded by historians as the world’s first birdwatcher, — location: 2522
Going back into prehistory, scientists have suggested that human language may have begun as a way to attract mates by showing off intelligence. — location: 2664
The evidence suggests that Darwin worked out natural selection in about 1838. — location: 2787
But let’s not forget Patrick Matthew. If you haven’t heard of him, this is because you are merely impressively, rather than impeccably, well read. Matthew was actually the first man to think of the idea of natural selection, expounding the theory in 1831 – the very year that the Beagle set out but before it reached the Galapagos chain. Matthew’s mistake was to publish it in a book with the exceptionally dull name, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. — location: 2794
And what of the finches? It turns out that they’re not finches after all, but tanagers, a large family of birds in the Americas that look a bit like finches, with the same short, rounded wings. But Darwin’s Tanagers does not have the same satisfyingly portentous dum-de dum-de rhythm as Darwin’s Finches, so perhaps for that trivial reason the name has stuck. Even a genius like Darwin made little mistakes – which is quite reassuring for us ordinary people. — location: 2804
According to folklore, every time the cuckoo sound was heard, a wife somewhere had just been unfaithful to her husband – hence the word ‘cuckolded’, used for a man whose wife has a tryst with another man. — location: 2824
The mother simply lays the eggs, but the father assigns himself, like all fathers who like tinkering with DIY, the task of building a huge mound of leaves and earth, sometimes 5 feet high and more than 10 feet wide, before the laying of the eggs. Occasionally he sticks his neck in it to make sure it’s the right temperature – a heady heat of 33–35°C. But there is a serious purpose behind this outwardly eccentric behaviour: he is building an oven warm enough to incubate the eggs, without the body heat of mum or dad. By the time the newly born bird has hatched, the parents are far away, and they will never knowingly meet their progeny. — location: 2864
John Clare (1793–1864), a rural labourer from rustic Northamptonshire who was both a first-rate poet and a pioneer in the world of ornithology, endured the latter. — location: 2946
Aristotle recorded that the European Nightjar – the species found in Britain – made livestock go blind by sucking their milk, which explains the Latin name Caprimulgus given to one branch of the family, meaning ‘goat sucker’. Although the name is an inaccurate slur that should prompt writs from the nightjars’ lawyers, it has stuck – and so has the nightjar’s evil reputation. — location: 2992
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)
Dubbed the Pfeilstorch (German for “arrow stork”), — location: 64
Banding birds can help scientists figure out how long birds live, how large their populations are, how they behave when defending a territory and raising young, and much more. Banding also has a special role in the management of waterfowl populations, because it helps wildlife authorities set harvesting limits for ducks and geese; there are even special “reward bands” that hunters receive a small cash reward for reporting, to help calculate the chances that someone who shoots a banded bird will report — location: 192
Jack Miner, or “Wild Goose Jack.” After establishing a waterfowl sanctuary on his property in Ontario — location: 317
“phenotypic plasticity,” the flexibility that lets an individual organism adjust its behavior — location: 423
“Radar” stands for radio detection and ranging, — location: 901
But we do know that as many as a billion birds die in building collisions like this one every year in the United States alone. — location: 1031
seven thousand miles, the longest nonstop migratory flight ever recorded. — location: 1513
Bartailed godwit
Birds aren’t just feathery mammals; their physiology is very different from ours. Like us, birds have lungs that exchange carbon dioxide in the blood for oxygen, but the similarities in how we breathe stop there. Bird lungs don’t expand and contract; instead, air is pumped through them in a single direction by a system of air sacs. This is a much more efficient system than ours, and it helps explain how bar-headed geese can manage sustained flight through the thin air at the roof of the world. — location: 1787
Movebank, the free online database where Icarus data is archived, — location: 1855
one thing is clear: in miles traveled per ounce of weight, the blackpoll warbler is one of the world’s greatest travelers. — location: 2029
Lynn led an ethics review to help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decide whether to cull barred owls to protect endangered spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest. He thinks about this stuff for a living. — location: 2198
“latitudinal gradient.” — location: 2283
Darién Gap — location: 2470
However, in recent years many organizations have been moving away from this term due to the political connotations related to the concept of who is and is not a “citizen” of a particular place. I will be using the modern phrase “community science” throughout this chapter.) — location: 2870
The longest-running community science project in the world, however, is the venerable Christmas Bird Count (or CBC), — location: 2880
Laysan albatross named Wisdom. Originally banded on Midway Atoll in 1956, she has (as far as we know) continued to return to the island to lay an egg each December for at least seventy years, making her the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world. — location: 3025