The Experience of Birding
Of all the ways to tell lesser and greater yellowlegses apart, one of the least appreciated is the difference in behavior. Greaters are violent and fast, rushing through the water like avocets, heads asway, while lessers are less frantic, picking and stepping high as they feed.
On a beautiful calm fall day like today, all you have to do is look for the ripples on the pond.
International events affect everything we do — right down to our choice of birdhouses.
This little bit of throwaway chauvinism was published in Bird Lore in the last months of the First World War.
I wonder what we patriots will be called on to reject next.
But I didn’t. Not until fairly recently, at least.
Filippo Picinelli’s famous Mundus symbolicus is on line pretty much all over the place. And Book IV, treating the emblematic use of birds, is hugely productive, and hugely under-exploited, font of information about the “properties,” real and imagined, of birds and their meanings.
There is Some.Very.Weird.Stuff in here.
Northern lapwings, for example, can stand for the words of the heretic, attractive at first but foolish and obscene when examined by the intellect. Or they can be the soul cleansed in baptism that falls back into sin. And so on, depending on what you happen to want it to mean.
Note that the Mundus is not an emblem book itself but rather an encyclopedia serving as an index. I’ve found it pretty difficult all in all to track down the actual emblemata Picinelli describes, but practice makes slightly better.
Have fun!
Today we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of the painter of one of my all-time favorite red-breasted mergansers, the Finnish artist and ornithologist Magnus von Wright.
I know rather little about him — wikipedia is my friend, I suppose — and I have never seen his most famous bird illustrations, published in the three-volume Svenska Fåglar.
I will learn more next July, no doubt, when we assemble in Stockholm on the 151st anniversary to explore the birds and art of the Baltic Sea.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed by Congress on July 3, 1918.
I guess we now know the life expectancy of democratically promulgated legislation, don’t we?
