How do birds hear the calls of species of bird other than their own? Is it like background noise that they can talk (sing) over, filtering out everything but the calls of their own
kind, like how you can talk over the murmur of a cocktail party until the second somebody says your name? Or is it more like something they consciously observe and work around, like
waiting for your turn to speak in a group conversation flitting between several different topics?
Either way: is such communication strategy an instinctive or a learned behaviour? It seems likely that at least part of birdsong communication is gained after hatching because birds
from noisy cities are louder than their country cousins (although you wouldn’t know it, to listen out of the bedroom window of my rural home, this morning!).
As part of our trip to the two-island republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Ruth and I decided we’d love to take a
trip out to Buccoo Reef, off the coast of the smaller island. The place we’ve been staying
during the Tobago leg of our visit made a couple of phone calls for us and suggested that we head on down to the boardwalk at nearby Buccoo the next morning where we’d apparently be
able to meet somebody from Pops Tours who’d be able to take us out1.
I could have shown you a picture of the fun ‘I ♥️ Buccoo’ sign from the boardwalk, but I got distracted by a Magnificent Frigatebird circling overhead2.
At the allotted time, we found somebody from Pops Tours, who said that he was still waiting for their captain to get there3
and asked us to go sit under the almond tree down the other end of the boardwalk and he’d meet us there.
It was only after we left to follow the instructions that I remembered that I don’t know how to identify an almond tree. So we opted to sit under a tree near a chicken teaching her
chicks how to eat a coconut4. I still don’t know if that was right, but the boaters found us in the
end so it can’t have been too far off.
We’d previously clocked that one of the many small boats moored in the bay was Cariad, and found ourselves intensely curious. All of the other
boats we’d seen had English-language names of the kinds you’d expect: a well-equipped pleasure craft optimistically named Fish Finder, a small dual-motorcraft with the moniker
Bounty, a brightly-coloured party boat named Cool Runnings, and so on. To travel a third of the way around the world to find a boat named in a familiar Welsh word felt
strange.
Either you’re an extremely long way from home, boat, or else somebody around here has a surprising interest in the Welsh language.
So imagine our delight when the fella we’d been chatting to came over, explained that their regular tour boat (presumably the one pictured on their website) was in the shop, and said
that his cousin would be taking us out in his boat instead… and that cousin came over piloting… the Cariad!
As we climbed aboard, we spotted that he was wearing a t-shirt with a Welsh dragon on it, and a sticker on the side of the helm carried a Welsh flag. What strange coincidence is this,
that Ruth and I – who met while living in Wales and come for a romantic getaway to the Caribbean – should happen to find ourselves aboard a literal “love” boat named in Welsh.
Long shallow sandbars and reefs almost surround the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, leaving enormous areas accessible only to low-draft boats (and helping to protect the islands from
some of the worst of the weather that the Caribbean can muster).
There probably aren’t many boats on Earth that fly both the colours of Trinidad & Tobago and of Wales, so we naturally had to ask: did you name this boat?, and why? It
turns out that yes, our guide for the day has a love of and fascination with Wales that we never quite got to the bottom of. He’d taken a holiday to Swansea just last year, and would be
returning to Wales again later this year.
It’s strange to think that anybody might deliberately take a holiday from a tropical island paradise to come to drizzly cold Wales, but there you have it. It sounds like he was
into his football and that might have had an impact on his choice of destination, but choose to believe that maybe there’s a certain affinity between parts of the world that have
experienced historical oppression at the hands of a colonial English mindset? Like: perhaps Nigerians would enjoy India as a getaway destination, or Guyanans would dig Mauritius as a
holiday spot, too?5
I wrote previously about visiting the Nylon Pool, an waist-deep bit of ocean on a sandbar a full half a mile offshore.
We took a dip at the Nylon Pool, snorkelled around parts of Buccoo Reef (replete with tropical fish of infinite variety and colour), spotted sea turtles zipping around the boat, and
took a walk along No Man’s Land (a curious peninsula, long and thin and cut-off from the mainland by mangrove swamps, so-named
because Trinidadian law prohibits claiming ownership of any land within a certain distance of the high tide mark… and this particular beach spot consists entirely of such land,
coast-to-coast, on account of its extreme narrowness. All in all, it was a delightful boating adventure.
(And for the benefit of the prospective tourist who stumbles upon this blog post in years to come, having somehow hit the right combination of keywords: we paid $400 TTD6
for the pair of us: that’s about £48 GBP at today’s exchange rate, which felt like exceptional value for an amazing experience given that we got the expedition entirely to ourselves.)
Any worries I might have had about the seaworthiness of our vessel as its owner repeatedly bailed out the back of the boat with a small bucket were quickly assuaged when I realised
that I could probably walk most of the way back to shore, should I need to! (sadly not visible: the Welsh dragon on front of his t-shirt)
But aside from the fantastic voyage we got to go on, this expedition was noteworthy in particular for Cariad and her cymruphile captain. It feels like a special kind of
small-world serendipity to discover such immediate and significant common ground with a stranger on the other side of an ocean… to coincide upon a shared interest in a culture and place
less-foreign to you than to your host.
An enormous diolch yn fawr7 is due to Pops Tours for this remarkable experience.
Footnotes
1 Can I take a moment to observe how much easier it was to charter a boat in Tobago than
it was in Ireland, where I left several answerphone messages but never even got a response? Although in the Irish boat
owners’ defence, I was being creepy and mysterious by asking them to take me to random coordinates off the coast.
2 It’s possible that I’ve become slightly obsessed with frigatebirds since arriving here.
I first spotted them from our ferry ride from Trinidad to Tobago, noticing their unusually widely-forked tails, striking white (in the case of the
females) chests, and relatively-effortless (for a seabird) thermal-chasing flight. But they’re really cool! They’re a seabird… that isn’t waterproof and can’t swim… if they land in
the water, they’re at serious risk of drowning! (Their lack of water-resistant feathers helps with their agility, most-likely.) Anyway – while they can snatch
shallow-swimming prey out of the water, they seem to prefer to (and get at least 40% of their food from) stealing it from other birds, harassing them in-flight and snatching it from
their bills, or else attacking them until they throw up and grabbing their victim’s vomit as it falls. Nature is weird and amazing.
3 Time works differently here. If you schedule something, it’s more a guideline than it is
a timetable. When Ruth and I would try paddleboarding a few days later we turned up at the rental shack at their published opening time and hung out on the beach for most of an hour
before messaging the owners via the number on their sign. After 15 minutes we got a response that said they’d be there in 10 minutes. They got there 20 minutes later and opened their
shop. I’m not complaining – the beach was lovely and just lounging around in the warm sea air with a cold drink from a nearby bar was great – but I learned from the experience that if
you’re planning to meet somebody at a particular time here, you might consider bringing a book. (Last-minute postscript: while trying to arrange our next accommodation, alongside
writing this post, I was told that I’d receive a phone call “in half an hour” to arrange payment: that was over an hour ago…)
4 Come for the story of small-world serendipity; stay for the copious candid bird photos,
I guess?
6 Exceptionally-geeky footnote time. The correct currency symbol for the Trinidad & Tobago
Dollar is an S-shape with two vertical bars through it, which is not quite the same as the conventional S-shape with a single vertical bar that you’re probably used to seeing
when referring to e.g. American, Canadian, or Australian dollars. Because I’m a sucker for typographical correctness, I decided that I’d try to type it “the right way” here in my blog
post, and figured that Unicode had solved this problem for me: the single-bar dollar sign that’s easy to type on your keyboard inherits its codepoint from ASCII, I guessed, so the
double-bar dollar sign would be elsewhere in Unicode-space, right? Like how Unicode defines single-bar (pound) and double-bar (lira) variants of the “pound sign”. But it turns out this isn’t the case: the double-bar dollar sign, sometimes called
cifrão (from Portugese), and the single-bar dollar sign are treated as allographs: they
share the same codepoint and only the choice of type face differentiates between them. I can’t type a double-bar dollar sign for you without forcing an additional font upon
you, and even if I did it wouldn’t render “correctly” for everybody. Unicode is great, but it’s not perfect.
7 “Thank you very much”, in Welsh, but you probably knew that already.
Big thanks to the cache owner for their note, letting me know that the cache location is still accessible. Somehow I’d not
seen the obvious route. Followed a family of ducks and soon found the cache location. So excited I could jump for joy.
In fact, I did!
FP awarded in part for the lovely cache but mostly for the attentive CO who posted a note so promptly.
TFTC!
One for joy, two for joy, three for joy, four for joy… basically any natural number of magpies brings me joy.
They’re smart (among the smartest corvids, who are already among the smartest birds).
They’re curious. They’re sociable. And they’re ever so pretty.
They’re common enough that you can see them pretty-much anywhere.
They steal things. They solve puzzles. They’re just awesome.
This is photo of a magpie riding a pig through the snow, which is objectively fantastic. No further explanation is required, nor given.
Also, did you know where their name comes from? It’s really cool:
In Medieval Latin, they’re called pica. It probably comes from Greek kitta, meaning “false appetite” and possibly related to the birds’ propensity for theft,
and/or from a presumed PIE1 root meaning “pointed” and referring to its beak shape.
In Old French, this became pie. They’re still called la pie in French today. Old English took this and also used pie.
By the 17th century, there came a fashion in English slang to give birds common names.
Sometimes the common name died out, such as with Old English wrenna which became wren and was extended to Jenny wren, which you’ll still hear nowadays
but mostly people just say wren.
Sometimes the original name disappeared, like with Old English ruddock2 which became
redbreast and was extended to Robin redbreast from which we get the modern name robin (although again, you’ll still sometimes hear robin
reabreast).
Magpie, though, retains both parts!3Mag in this case is short for
Margaret, a name historically associated with idle chatter4.
So we get pica > pie > Maggie pie > Mag pie > magpie! Amazing!
This magpie’s looking pretty chill. Also pretty. Also chill.
I probably have a soft spot for animals with distinct black-and-white colouration – other favourite animals might include the plains zebra, European badger, black-and-white ruffed
lemur, Malayan tapir, Holstein cattle, Atlantic puffin… – but the magpie’s the best of them. It hits the sweet spot in all those characteristics listed above, and it’s just a wonderful
year-around presence in my part of the world.
Footnotes
1 It’s somewhat confusing writing about the PIE roots of the word pie…
2Ruddock shares a root with “ruddy”, which is frankly a better description of
the colour of a robin’s breast than “red”.
3 Another example of a bird which gained a common name and retained both that and its
previous name is the jackdaw.
4 Reflective, perhaps, of the long bursts of “kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-” chattering sounds
magpies make to assert themselves. The RSPB
have a great recording if you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’ll recognise the sound when you hear it! – but they also make a load of other vocalisations in the wild and can even learn to imitate human speech!
There’s a bird feeder in my garden. I’ve had it for about a decade now – Ruth got it for me, I think, as a thirtiethbirthday present – and it’s still going strong and mostly-intact, despite having been uprooted on several
occasions to move house.
I like that I can see it from my desk.
A woodpecker’s been a regular visitor this winter.
This month, though, it lost a piece, when one of its seed cages was stolen in a daring daylight heist by a duo of squirrels who climbed up the (“climb-proof”) pole, hung upside-down
from the hooks, and unscrewed the mechanism that held the feeder in place.
Not content to merely pour out and devour the contents, the miscreants made off with the entire feeder cage. It hasn’t been seen since. I’ve scoured the lawn, checked behind
the bushes, peered around bins and fence posts… it’s nowhere to be found. It’s driving me a little crazy that it’s vanished so-thoroughly.
Artists’ recreation of one of the culprits. (Courtesy @mikebirdy.)
I can only assume that the squirrels, having observed that the feeder would routinely be refilled once empty, decided that it’d be much more-convenient for them if it the feeder were
closer to their home:
“Hey, Coco!”
“Yeah, Peanut?”
“Every time we steal the nuts in this cage, more nuts appear…”
“Yeah, it’s a magic cage. Everysquirrel knows that, Peanut!”
“…but we have to come all the way down here to eat them…”
“It’s a bit of a drag, isn’t it?”
“…so I’ve been thinking, Coco: wouldn’t it be easier if the cage was… in our tree?”
Scene of the crime.
I like to imagine that the squirrels who live in whatever-tree the feeder’s now hidden in are in the process of developing some kind of cargo cult around it. Once a week, squirrels sit
and pray at the foot of the cage, hoping to appease the magical god who refills it. Over time, only the elders will remember seeing the feeder ever being full, and admonish their
increasingly-sceptical youngers ones to maintain their disciplined worship. In decades to come, squirrel archaeologists will rediscover the relics of this ancient (in squirrel-years)
religion and wonder what inspired it.
Or maybe they dumped the feeder behind the shed. I’d better go check.
My favourite thing about geese… is the etymologies of all the phrases relating to geese. There’s so many, and they’re all amazing. I started reading about one, then –
silly goose that I am – found another, and another, and another…
Have a gander at this photo.
For example:
Barnacle geese are so-called because medieval
Europeans believed that they grew out of a kind of barnacle called a goose barnacle, whose shell pattern… kinda, sorta
looks like barnacle goose feathers? Barnacle geese breed on remote Arctic islands and so people never saw their chicks, which – coupled with the fact that migration wasn’t understood
– lead to a crazy myth that lives on in the species name to this day. Incidentally, this strange belief led to these geese being classified as a fish for the purpose of
fasting during Lent, and so permitted. (This from the time period that brought us the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, of course. I’ve written about both previously.)
Gooseberries may have a similar etymology. Folks have tried to connect it to old Dutch or Germanic words, but inconclusively: given that they appear at the opposite
end of the year to some of the migratory birds goose, the same kind of thinking that gave us “barnacle geese” could be seen as an explanation for gooseberries’ name, too. But really:
nobody has a clue about this one. Fun fact: the French name for the fruit is groseille à maquereau, literally “mackerel currant”!
A gaggle is the collective noun for geese, seemingly derived from the sound they make. It’s also been used to describe groups of humans, especially if they’re
gossiping (and disproportionately directed towards women). “Gaggle” is only correct when the geese are on the ground, by the way: the collective noun for a group of airborne geese is
skein or plump depending on whether they’re in a delta shape or not, respectively. What a fascinating and confusing language we have!
John Stephen Farmer helps us with a variety of goose-related sexual slang though, because, well, that was his jam. He observes that a goose’s neck was a penis and
gooseberries were testicles, goose-grease is vaginal juices. Related: did you ever hear the euphemism for where babies come from “under a
gooseberry bush“? It makes a lot more sense when you realise that gooseberry bush was slang for pubic hair.
Hey there, you big honker.
An actor whose performance wasn’t up to scratch might describe the experience of being goosed; that is – hissed at by the crowd. Alternatively,
goosing can refer to a a pinch on the buttocks possibly in reference to geese pecking humans at about that same height.
If you have a gander at something you take a good look at
it. Some have claimed that this is rhyming slang – “have a look” coming from “gander and duck” – but I don’t buy it. Firstly, why wouldn’t it be “goose and duck” (or “gander and
drake“, which doesn’t rhyme with “look” at all). And fake, retroactively-described rhyming roots are very common: so-called mockney rhyming slang! I suspect
it’s inspired by the way a goose cranes its neck to peer at something that interests it! (“Crane” as a verb is of course also a bird-inspired word!)
Goosebumps might appear on your skin when you’re cold or scared, and the name alludes to the appearance of plucked poultry. Many languages use geese, but some use
chickens (e.g. French chair de poule, “chicken flesh”). Fun fact: Slavic languages often use anthills as the metaphor for goosebumps, such as Russian мурашки по коже (“anthill skin”). Recently, people talk of tapping into goosebumps if they’re using their fear as a motivator.
The childrens game of duck duck goose is played by declaring somebody to be a “goose” and then running away before they catch you. Chasing – or at risk of being
chased by! – geese is common in metaphors: if somebody wouldn’t say boo to a goosethey’re
timid. A wild goose chase (yet another of the many phrases for which we
can possibly thank Shakespeare, although he probably only popularised this one) begins without consideration of where it might end up.
If humans tell children they were found under a gooseberry bush, where do geese tell their chicks they came from?
If those children are like their parents, you might observe that a wild goose never laid a tame egg: that traits are inherited and predetermined.
Until 1889, the area between Blackfriars and Tower Bridge in London – basically everything around Borough tube
station up to the river – was considered to be outside the jurisdiction of both London and Surrey, and fell under the authority of the Bishop of Winchester. For a few hundred years it
was the go-to place to find a prostitute South of the Thames, because the Bishop would license them to be able to trade there. These prostitutes were known as Winchester geese. As a result, to be
bitten by a Winchestergoose was to contract a venereal disease, and goosebumps became a slang term for the symptoms of some such
diseases.
Perennial achillea ptarmica is known, among other names, as goose tongue,
and I don’t know why. The shape of the plant isn’t particularly similar to that of a goose’s tongue, so I think it might instead relate to the effect of chewing the leaves, which
release a spicy oil that might make your tongue feel “pecked”? Goose tongue can also refer to plantago
maritima, whose dense rosettes do look a little like goose tongues, I guess. Honestly, I’ve no clue about this one.
If you’re sailing directly downwind, you might goose-wing your
sails, putting the mainsail away from the wind and the jib towards it, for balance and to easily maintain your direction. Of course, a modern triangular-sailed boat usually goes
faster broad reach (i.e. at an angle of about 45º to the wind) by enough that it’s faster to zig-zag downwind rather than go directly downwind, but I can see how one might sometimes
want to try this anatidaetian maneuver.
I feel like the “Cross Bones Graveyard” ought to have been where pirates were buried, but prostitutes is pretty good too.
Geese make their way all over our vocabulary. If it’s snowing, the old woman is plucking her
goose. If it’s fair to give two people the same thing (and especially if one might consider not doing so on account of their sex), you might say that what’s good
for the goose is good for the gander, which apparentlyused to use
the word “sauce” instead of “good”. I’ve no idea where the idea of cooking someone’s goose comes from, nor why anybody thinks that a goose step
march might look anything like the way a goose walks waddles.
I think our local red kites were mostly living on roadkill, and the lockdown means they’re not getting fed. They’ve also forgotten how to hunt: this afternoon I watched one get its ass
handed to it by a medium-sized crow.
I told this story to a few guildies a while back and decided to archive it in a longer format; so here is the story of The Great Flamingo Uprising of 2010 as told to me by my
favorite cousin who was a keeper at the time.
In addition to the aviary/jungle exhibit, our zoo has several species of birds that pretty much have the run of the place. They started with a small flock of flamingos and some
free-range peacocks that I’m almost certain came from my old piano teacher’s farm. She preferred them to chickens. At some point in time they also acquired a pair of white swans
(“hellbirds”) and some ornamental asian duckies to decorate the pond next to the picnic area. Pigeons, crows, assorted ducks and a large number of opportunistic Canada geese moved
in on their own.
…
I lost it at the bit where the koi blooped again.
Morals: geese are evil, swans are eviler, flamingos and peacocks are weird as fuck, and this story’s hilarious.
“The three parents share incubation responsibilities for the eggs — three this year — as they have in previous years,” according to Out There With the
Birds, the blog of Bird Watcher’s Digest. “Like their relationship, their history is complicated.”
…
So… two eagles, Valor I (male) and Hope (female) raised some chicks in a nest. Then Valor II (another male) came along and tried to displace Valor I, but he wouldn’t go, so the pair of
them both ultimately cooperated in raising Hope’s chicks, even after Hope was driven away by some other eagles. Later, another female, Starr, turned up and Valor I and Valor II
are collectively incubating three eggs of hers in the nest.
I’ve known (human) polyamorous networks with origin stories less-complicated than this.
The gannet heeded conservationists' calls to settle on a small New Zealand island. Unfortunately, no eligible ladies did.
Nigel, a handsome gannet bird who lived on a desolate island off the coast of New Zealand, died suddenly this week. Wherever his soul has landed, the singles scene surely cannot
be worse.
The bird was lured to Mana Island five years ago by wildlife officials who, in hopes of establishing a gannet colony there, had placed concrete gannet decoys on cliffsides and
broadcast the sound of the species’ calls. Nigel accepted the invitation, arriving in 2013 as the island’s first gannet in 40 years. But none of his brethren joined him.
In the absence of a living love interest, Nigel became enamored with one of the 80 faux birds. He built her — it? — a nest. He groomed her “chilly, concrete feathers . . . year
after year after year,” the Guardian
reported. He died next to her in that unrequited love nest, the vibrant orange-yellow plumage of his head contrasting, as ever, with the weathered, lemony paint of hers.
“Whether or not he was lonely, he certainly never got anything back, and that must have been [a] very strange experience,” conservation ranger Chris Bell, who also lives on the
island, told the paper. “I think we all have a lot of empathy for him, because he had this fairly hopeless situation.”
While on lunch break from the MCGProjects conference in York, Jenny Townshend shoots footage of a harrier hawk flying through a loop made by the arms of Dan and some random tourist.
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