Thursday, October 30, 2008
A visitor
I've just seen the Eurasian Jay again. He was sat on the wall when I went into the kitchen, so I sneaked up to the window and stood very still. He hopped down to where I leave out crumbs for the sparrows and had a ltttle explore. His colours in real life are really lovely, much better than all the photos and paintings I've seen.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
What a beautiful bird. I think you're so lucky to see him.
Cas
K and I were admiring fishing flies in a shop window in Hay, and decided to make our own. With handmade hooks that were just for looking at. And then we found two jay feathers, the bright blue striped ones. They were perfect for the job. Jays have so much colour, don't they? I wonder if they were named after popinjays, or popinjays were named after them?
Cas: I was indeed. It was amazing, they look as if they are made up from lots of other birds.
Dru: Popinjay was the word for a parrot
"The word travelled with the bird from Africa and can be traced back to the Arabic babbaga, through Spanish papagayo and Old French papeiaye. One of the earlier English versions (it had lots of forms before it settled to the spelling we know now) was papengay but it seems the ending was changed because people thought the name referred to a sort of jay. " I found this on World Wide Words.
The blue feathers are lovely but I liked the reddish warm orangy brown body feathers best.
Fishing flies are intersting, they always look too beautiful to use.
When my boys were in their early teens I read a book on taking care of "Wild Animal Babies". Not long after a baby blue jay was in our front yard, barely feathered and with a badly broken leg. At nightfall when he hadn't been "rescued" by a parent, I brought him in, tried to splint the leg that was almost torn in two, and fed him the mixture I'd read about in the book.
His leg healed, but he never had use of his foot, so he could only hang onto things with one. He grew to "full" size, and was a pet for about 5 years. He went on vacation with us, he mimicked every noise inside or outside the house; the television, chainsaws, the dog...his talent was amazing.
The coloring of your visitor is even more lovely!
alan
alan: That's an amazing story. My dad told me that if you shaved a Jay's tongue it would speak!
Post a Comment