16 Wednesday May 2018
Ornithomancy: Noun; rarely used; divination by means of the flight and cries of birds; augury. From Byzantine Greek ὀρνιθομαντεία divination from birds, augury from ancient Greek ὀρνιθο- + μαντεία (Oxford Dictionary).
I predict that the person who eats fish and chips at the seaside will be attacked by gulls and is likely also to get pooped upon!
09 Wednesday May 2018
Posted in nature
Binomial: noun; a two-part name, especially the Latin name of a species of living organism (consisting of the genus followed by the specific epithet) (Oxford Dictionary). I have just finished reading John Wright’s book about binomials, The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names (Bloomsbury, 2014), and it’s surprisingly entertaining. I’m not going to start doing book reviews on here but I thought I’d just share a tiny sample of the weird and wonderful binomials John writes about and, if that tempts you to read the book, then all well and good.
Senecio squalidus (Oxford ragwort) translates as ‘dirty old man’ and Primula vulgaris (Primrose) is ‘first common girl’. There are names derived from fiction: Yoda purpurata, a genus of deep-sea acorn worms, is so named because the large lips on the sides of its head are reminiscent of Yoda’s ears; and, under the influence of the Harry Potter books, a dragon-like dinosaur is named Dracorex hogwartsia, dragon king of Hogwarts. There’s a midge named after a rock band: Dicrotendipes thanatogratus translates to Grateful Dead; and a land snail named after Australian zookeeper and conservationist Steven Irwin: Crikey steveirwini. There are carabid beetles named Agra vate and Agra vation (say them out loud), and there’s a horsefly with ‘a perfectly round and golden rear end’ called Scaptia beyonceae. Enough … check out the book for more.
02 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
#WildWords, attracted to light, British insects, Chironomidae species, non-biting midge, phototaxis, repelled by light, wild words
Phototaxis: noun; biology; the bodily movement of a motile organism in response to light, either towards the source of light (positive phototaxis) or away from it (negative phototaxis) (Oxford Dictionary).
I hadn’t realised that some creatures suffer from negative phototaxis but, apparently, cockroaches are repelled by light – I thought they were just scurrying away from the humans who want to kill them. The example of positive phototaxis (i.e. an attraction to a light source) that immediately springs to mind is the moth – I’m sure we’ve all noticed them fluttering around a bright light at night – though there are many other examples. One of these is the insect in my photos: it’s one of the large family of non-biting midges (Chironomidae species). I found perhaps 30 of them on a wall near a street light recently.
25 Wednesday Apr 2018
Tags
#WildWords, aposematism, butterfly, Peacock, Peacock butterfly, warning coloration, warning patterns, wild words
Aposematism: noun; from the Greek ἀπό apo meaning ‘away’ and σῆμα sema meaning ‘sign’; a term developed in the 19th century, reputedly by Edward Bagnall Poulton (a British evolutionary biologist), for the bright colorations or conspicuous markings that creatures use to warn or repel predators. Typical examples are things like bright yellow frogs or orange-and-black-striped caterpillars, whose colours serve as a warning to potential predators that they taste bad or might even be poisonous, and, butterflies, like the Peacock shown here, with big bold eye-type markings that make them look larger than they really are.
18 Wednesday Apr 2018
I love this little miracle that happens every spring, and I couldn’t resist having ‘bud burst’ as this week’s words after seeing many beautiful examples when I was out walking on Monday.
During winter, deciduous trees look so bare and barren, yet, safely enclosed within the protective cases of their ‘bud scales’, tiny leaves are beginning to grow. Then, once temperatures start to warm up, the trees’ roots absorb more water and the sap begins to rise. The leaf buds grow and swell to the point when their scales just can’t contain them any more and then, one day …
Shazam! The buds burst out and begin to expand and soak up the spring sunshine!
11 Wednesday Apr 2018
Tags
#WildWords, alternate plumage, birding, birdwatching, breeding plumage, British birds, nuptial plumage, Turnstone, wild words
Nuptial plumage, also known as breeding plumage and alternate plumage, is the plumage assumed by adult birds prior to their annual breeding season. This plumage is generally more colourful than the bird’s usual plumage, presumably in order to attract the opposite sex. Birds achieve this change by moulting their feathers, before breeding into their nuptial ‘glad-rags’, and then afterwards, returning to their usual ‘day wear’.
My photos show the change happening in the Turnstones I see so often in my local patch. The first photo (above), taken in January, shows the bird’s winter plumage. The following two photos, taken in March and April, show the moult in progress, and the final photo, taken in August, is after breeding has finished, when the bird is moulting from its nuptial plumage back to its winter, non-breeding plumage. To see these birds in their full nuptial plumage, I would have to head to their breeding grounds in Canada or Greenland, a tempting proposition but not affordable at this time!
04 Wednesday Apr 2018
Tags
#WildWords, British flora, Equisetum arvense, Equisteum, Field horsetail, Horsetail, strobilus, wild words
Strobilus: noun; a botanical term, which came originally from the Greek strephein meaning ‘to twist’, and which is used to describe the cone of a pine, fir or other conifer; and also ‘a structure resembling the cone of a conifer, such as the flower of the hop’ (Oxford Dictionary).
I have the lovely Helen of Plantlife Cymru to thank for this word because, when I originally posted this photo on Twitter, she responded by saying that ‘the strobilus is ascending’. My photo shows the newly emerged stalks of Equisetum (possibly Field horsetail, Equisteum arvense), which is a dinosaur of the plant world, a plant that reproduces using spores rather than seeds. The spores are produced in the strobili, the cone-like structures you can see on the tips of the stems.
28 Wednesday Mar 2018
Tags
#WildWords, bird courtship display, bird displays, birding, birds displaying, birdwatching, British birds, Great Crested Grebe, wild words
Display: Verb; the Oxford Dictionary defines this as: ‘(of a male bird [though, from what I’ve seen, female birds also respond to and/or participate in displays], reptile, or fish) to engage in a specialized pattern of behaviour that is intended to attract a mate’. The word comes from the Anglo-French desplaier or desploier, meaning literally, ‘to unfold’.
The birds section of the Stanford University website has a really thorough description of this behaviour, including a diagram of some of the display postures adopted by their Western Grebe. In Britain, the equivalent bird is the Great crested grebe, which also gets a mention and which has a particularly lovely display to watch, as you can see in these recent shots of local birds displaying.
21 Wednesday Mar 2018
Forest: noun; a large area covered chiefly with trees and undergrowth. The Oxford Dictionary says the word morphed from the Latin foris, meaning ‘outside’, to the late Latin forestis (silva), meaning ‘(wood) outside’, to Old French and thence to Middle English.
Today just happens to be a day to celebrate the importance of all types of forests and woodlands and trees all around the globe, so here’s wishing you a very happy International Forests Day!
14 Wednesday Mar 2018
Tags
#WildWords, birding, birdwatching, blackbird, leucism, leucistic, leucistic blackbird, wild words
Leucistic: Adjective; (of an animal) [or other creature] having whitish fur, plumage, or skin due to a lack of pigment (Oxford Dictionary).
It’s not easy being different as this leucistic black-and-white Blackbird seems to be discovering. I’ve spotted it several times in and around a neighbour’s backyard in recent days, usually sitting alone, looking a little bereft. Once it tried to approach first a male and then a female Blackbird, adopting the submissive posture a young bird would adopt to beg food from its parents, but the other birds totally rejected it and flew off.
I’ve posted about leucistic birds before: a Crow here, and a Jackdaw was the star here.
