This bird baffled me for a while, until I used Merlin and found out it was a female house sparrow. I always forget to account for the gender differences in birds.
It was flitty in the extreme, so I counted myself lucky to get these shots.
Say what?
Hold your breath and dive in!
Birds are so damn flitty, aren’t they? There was a CBC program, many years ago, called “Something and Charles” (no, the co-host wasn’t called “Something”) which tried to explain science simply. We can mimic bird song by whistling, for example, but it doesn’t sound right. They showed that our whistles had to be speeded up many times — MANY times — to obtain not only the right notes, but the right tone to the notes. It makes we wonder if EVERYTHING in birds’ lives, especially small birds’ lives, takes place at a higher frequency.
Jim T
Jim – That’s interesting – about the relationship between our whistling and bird song. Their metabolisms are higher, I think, but I couldn’t quickly find anything better than this essay, which talks about songbird metabolic rates being 30 – 70% higher than other birds and mammals. So, yeah, maybe they do go through life a tad quicker on all fronts.
There is something about house sparrows in London, milk bottle caps, and critical mass, or perhaps tipping points that is sticking in my mind, and won’t come out…
We have a winter feeder outside our bedroom window. It’s fun to watch them, sometimes 20 or 30 at a time.
Ian – Interesting. I didn’t find anything on London, but blue tits were drinking cream off front steps in East Swaythling in 1921. I think house sparrows are pretty, but a friend assures me they’re very aggressive, pushing out other birds.