Today I did some work on my bird photos database, which is ever a work-in-progress. This was prompted by editing a bunch more photos from my trip to Germany and the Netherlands back in June. I got up to a day where I spent several hours walking around in parkland in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, and photographed several birds. I identified them and noticed a few weren’t in my current list of birds that I’ve photographed, so of course I had to spend some time updating the database. I also added a batch of bird photos that I took on my trip to Orange back in September.
I was sitting on 297 species photographed, but the additions bring me up to 301. The new additions were: common wood pigeon:
and great crested grebe:
Checking the order in which I took the photos, I can declare that the Eurasian magpie is the 300th bird species that I have photographed! Although this is a common bird in Europe, it doesn’t exist in Australia, so I was unfamiliar with it and didn’t know what it was until I did a search. We have Australian magpies in Australia, but they don’t look much alike other than the black and white colouration, which is in such a different pattern that the Eurasian magpies actually don’t look like “magpies” to me. (The 301st was the common wood pigeon, if you were interested.)
Other events today: one more ethics class on holidays. I was in the middle of teaching it when suddenly the dog downstairs went berserk, barking at something rustling in the trees outside the fence (either a person or maybe a brushturkey). The next thing I knew there was a huge crash of the vertical blinds on the living room window, and I looked around and Scully had jumped up from the floor to the sofa and then the window sill to see what was happening, and she was barking like crazy too.
Now, Scully is trained not to jump up on the sofa, but this was obviously a special situation and demanded that she have a look out the window. After the ruckus was over, she sheepishly stood on the sofa and waited for me to put her back down on the floor (as she is trained to do – she’s allowed on the sofa, but not allowed to jump up or down). I had to interrupt my class and tell the kids I’d be a few seconds putting Scully down.
New content today:
Nice bird pictures!
It’s also nice to, again, realize how different the flora and fauna are in different places. All four birds pictured are common where I live in Finland, though I think I’ve never seen a great crested grebe. The others I can see basically every day in the summer close to my apartment. (I think the magpies might not even migrate, the others do.)
The scariest gulls I saw was some years ago, when I was coming home on a spring night. There was a flock of maybe 300-400 gulls, of various species, also of herring gulls, and they were making a lot of noise. They did let me pass by, but I was quite wary.