Friday, July 14, 2006

Bird watching, England style

I made a comment yesterday about not seeing many birds here. There are trees and shrubs everywhere but not many birds. Then I began looking in earnest for the birds that I imagined must be living here and so, I began seeing them.

There is a bird in our backyard that looks like a hybrid of a crow and a pigeon. The head is dark black, shiny with a crow's eyes and beak. The body then changes to white with a plump breast and short legs followed by a smear of blue feathers ending finally with a black tail. This conglomerated bird stalked around the yard all morning eating something out of the grass.

The second bird I noticed looked like a dove on steroids. It's just a bit smaller than a seagull. This bird is the soft gray of a west Texas mourning dove with a white band around it's throat and maybe, maybe I saw a bit of darker gray on the wings or the tail. It's flight is not anything like a dove. It coasts quite a bit, unlike doves and pigeons which seem to flap their wings almost constantly in flight.

I'll watch more carefully today to see if I can find any other interesting birds.

4 comments:

Michael said...

Is that the most boring, yawnavision post you've ever read or what? Man, I'm slipping. I get to blame this one on jet lag. I promise I'll kick it up a notch from now on. Off to London and Dover. Will post when I return.
Yours truly...

Katie said...

Yeah, that post was a little lame. Hand the keyboard over to Barrett! That boy surely has something to share with the world!

Anonymous said...

go kill a couple of those birds and write about that...now that would be interesting. btw, it is HOT here.

Corey said...

Wow. England must really suck. Now, if you would have seen and killed a pig in your backyard, THAT would be interesting.

Kevin said it was hot. He didn't quite give it the credit. You sweat when you do math in your head. You sweat when you are taking a cold shower. It is that kind of hot.

The movers were there on Thursday and it was 102. I really thought I was going to get to see a dead man in my front yard. That would have made an interesting blog.

Happy Bird Watching, Boring Von Dull.