Birding the Middle Ages

No, I didn’t mean “middle age.”

Cleaning out a long-disused e-mail account this morning, I ran across a note headed, intriguingly, “Italian Birds, circa 1425.” Generally, that would be spam, but it was from a colleague at the Metropolitan, so I opened it to find images of a fifteenth-century plate, ornamented with a painted pastoral scene and the usual marginal birds. Could I identify them? “By next Tuesday?” Today’s Tuesday.

The Greenfinch, the Common Whitethroat, and the Wren are all a bit fanciful, but still identifiable, I think. The Bullfinch, the Scops Owl, the Hoopoe, the Corncrake, and the White Stork are more realistically, perhaps more carefully, depicted.

Sometimes we truly do bird in time, not just in space!