While I’ve been… let’s say “away,” Mark has been just as busy as ever.
While I’ve Been… “Away”
nature
RSPB Spotlight: Woodpeckers
Yaffle. The very first time I heard this widely used British colloquial name for the Green Woodpecker I was instantly taken by it. Thought to have been derived in the Eighteenth Century from the call made by the species, yaffle so well expresses the Zeitgeist of this ground-loving member of the woodpecker family that once learned it’s difficult to call it by its official common name.
A Botanical Awakening
It was during a walk near Radley Lakes with my friends Jo and Chris that I first suddenly took notice of the isolated curious brown stalks with the odd curling bits all around their tops. We had been stooping our way through what was once a water meadow but of more recent use as a […]
A Field Guide for Our Times
Now in it’s seventh edition and continuing under the authorship of Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer, with range maps by Paul Lehman and additional artwork by David Quinn, John Schmitt, and Thomas Schultz, this new National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds presents its readers with 1,023 species. Following the taxonomy and nomenclature – both common and scientific – of the American Ornithological (due to an editorial error identified as “Ornithologist’s” in the text) Society, and with a bit of a nod given to the listing areas of the American Birding Association, this is indeed the most appropriate field guide for all who want not only a field reference that can identify any bird seen in its defined geographic area, but can also go deep into the metaphorical tall grass in pursuit of identifications down to subspecies level.