Gwyn

Posts tagged with "birds"

Blimey

Tuesday, 8. August 2006, 16:42:33

We know we've got great pictures at fotoLibra. The problem is telling all the people who need to know about us.

Sometimes it's serendipity. At the BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair I collared a man swanning past our stand. He had a badge reading 'RSPB' (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, for the benefit of my foreign readers). They publish a magazine called 'Birds' (no, honestly) which has a circulation of 600,000. That's six hundred thousand.

'We've got great bird pictures at fotoLibra!' I begged. He disdainfully removed my twitching fingers from his elegant lapel. 'Fool,' he spat, 'don't you know the RSPB has the greatest collection of bird photographs known to mankind? I sneer on your poxy little libraire.'

He stalked on.

But today we sold our second and third bird photographs to the RSPB, both by Linda Wright, one of our star photographers. Have a look at her work.

Just goes to show, dunnit!

This is a cheery, uplifting, good news blog post, and there's going to be another equally joyful one on Thursday, because we have some really exciting news to impart! But if you get easily depressed, don't read tomorrow's blog posting because it will hurl you straight into the Slough of Despond. You have been warned.

Errm, yabba-dabba. Do?

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Wrynecks and Golden Orioles

Friday, 7. July 2006, 10:37:30

birds, golden oriole, wryneck

fotoLibra sent out a Picture Call on behalf of the National Trust the other day. They wanted photographs of wrynecks, a rare woodpecker. I’ve never seen a wryneck, so I did a little research and found there were a total of six pairs living in Britain.

Fat chance, I thought, but nevertheless we asked our intrepid members to upload pictures of wrynecks. Within 24 hours there were four on the site. I was staggered – and so was the National Trust (who still haven’t confirmed the purchase, by the way). Our 12,000 fotoLibra members can be a little troublesome sometimes but 99.9% of the time they are ABSOLUTELY BLOODY FANTASTIC!

Emboldened by this excellent result, we wondered if anyone had shots of Golden Orioles. You see, I have a theory about Golden Orioles: they don’t exist.

I believe the Golden Oriole was created by unscrupulous bird book publishers in order to promote their wares. In exactly the same way that magazine sales rise when a pretty girl is on the cover and fall when there’s an ugly man, bird book publishers invented the Golden Oriole to add some much needed pizzazz to the LBJ market (most birds in Britain that aren’t magpies are Little Brown Jobs). The Golden Oriole is the stunning exception. Bright, bright yellow and black, with a startling red bill, it is an omigodlookatthat sort of creature.

Snag is, no one’s ever actually seen one. That’s Because They Don’t Exist, Dummy. It is blindingly obvious they have been made up by the HarperCollins art department in order to sell books.

The way they get around the awkward fact that they don’t exist is to blandly assert that “this incredibly shy bird spends all its time hiding in treetops. So the chances of you seeing one are frankly nil, mate.”

Oh yeah? So why has it got the most spectacular colouring of any European bird? In order to sell books? Or to hide itself away in tree tops? I think we all know the answer, don’t we? I don’t leave my orange Lamborghini Murcielago hidden away in a garage, I park it in the street so all can admire it (trouble is I can’t remember which street I parked it in).

My serene confidence in this theory took a little bit of a battering yesterday. fotoLibra members Eatock-Muir uploaded the following images to the site.

And they go on to claim these are juvenile Golden Orioles.

Hmmm. Still not entirely convinced. I swear they’re Photoshop mavens.

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Swifts

Wednesday, 3. May 2006, 10:52:09

birds, migration, summer, pleasure

They’re back! -- spotted yesterday afternoon in North London.

Every year I wait eagerly for the arrival of these most aerial of birds. It seems I’m not alone in this. There’s an ordinary guy in Oxford who has become a world authority on the creatures; they do inspire a devoted following. Apus apus spends the early summer in the UK before flying back to southern Africa for the winter. What a splendid life. They arrive around now and it’s rare to see one after mid-August.

Some people believe adult swifts can spend up to four years on the wing, never coming to land. They eat, sleep and mate in flight. Perhaps I could start a rumour that they lay eggs on the wings of other swifts.

I know one shouldn’t anthropomorphise such things, but if you have spent any time admiring a flock of swifts in flight it’s hard to avoid grinning because to us it seems as if they’re all just on their way to some great party somewhere and they’re inviting everyone they see. They shriek with delight, exulting in the raw joy of flying.

Apus means footless, and it’s easy to see how apt the Latin name is. They do have vestigial feet, more use for hanging on to a cliff edge than for mundane functions like walking. Footloose and fancy free, footless and fancy free.

I went up into my office one morning, and found someone had left a blackened old banana skin on the floor. I stooped to pick it up to find it was a swift, curved like a bow without the arrow. I’d left the south-facing windows open overnight (it’s on the fourth floor) and the bird was lying stunned on the carpet. I took the featherlight creature up to the flat roof and placed it carefully on the zinc. It was rigid and I feared it was dead. I backed off, and when I climbed down in to the office, a flash of a scimitar wing scythed past the window. He had gone.

As Ted Hughes commented in his unsentimentally accurate paean to swifts: “Not ours any more.”

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Hoopoes

Saturday, 22. April 2006, 21:00:35

hoopoe, golden oriole, painted bunting, birds

Every European bird book seems to have one or more of four birds on the cover: Golden Oriole, Hoopoe, Bee-eater and/or Roller. American bird books always have Painted Buntings.

Now why is this? Could it be because of the glories of four colour printing?

Yes. The chances of seeing a Golden Oriole, Hoopoe, Bee-eater or a Roller in the UK are remote, to say the least. But the illustrations sell books. They offer the possibilities of glory. I’ve never seen a Golden Oriole or Painted Bunting (I’m not entirely convinced that they exist outside the imagination of bird illustrators -- and to strengthen my suspicions, there are no photographs of either of them on the fotoLibra site), but the bird that kicked off my interest was the Hoopoe.

They are said to have a preference for vicarage lawns, and my father was a vicar (well, a rector actually, but that’s a longer story). I was six years old. I looked out of the window and there on the lawn was the most extraordinary bird I had ever seen. I ran to my father babbling “Daddy, Daddy, what’s that bird!” He glanced briefly up from his sermon and muttered “It’s a pigeon”.

Very few pigeons in my limited experience were orange with black and white wings, a crest and a curved bill. In that moment I realized my father, unlike the Pope, was not infallible.

Of course, it was a hoopoe. And this vicarage lawn was in Krumpendorf, Carinthia.

And as far as I recall, my father wasn’t wrong about anything else.

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