Herds of wandering bears may come, with buns

[venta]

Yesterday, walking round the lake at work, I saw an interesting sight. I tried to take a photo of it, but it was a long way away and I only had a camera phone.



I realise that is the sort of photo which tends to conclude "... and thus clearly the Loch Ness monster exists". I promise it looked better in real-o-vision. Two large, dark-coloured birds standing completely still with their wings spread.

We get herons on the lake, but these were the wrong colour to be herons. Possibly also the wrong shape, but at that distance it was a little hard to tell. Earlier in the walk we'd spotted what looked like a very weird brown duck crossing the water high speed on the far side of an island... it turned out to be the head of a small deer swimming from bank to bank. So species-identification was clearly not my strong point yesterday, but I estimated these birds might be cormorants.

M'colleague and I assumed that it must be some sort of mating display. Neither of us knows much about the mating habits of cormorants[*]. If they were cormorants.

Last night, in the pub, I asked my unexpectedly ornithologically-inclined friend if she knew whether cormorants stuck their wings out like that (and in my demonstration managed to knock an orchid off a window-sill). Yes, they do. Apparently cormorants are very poorly-designed water-birds. They do not have oiled feathers, so become waterlogged and have to hang their wings out to dry.

I found this sufficiently interesting that I tweeted it to m'colleague. Unfortunately, I managed to miss a character out of his username, and sent it instead to some unsuspecting chap called @talldave. Whom I do not know.

This has, unfortunately, given me a burning desire to tweet random pieces of trivia to total strangers. Don't worry, I won't.

Probably.

This morning, my train unexpectedly ground to a halt outside West Ealing for a very long time. Fortunately, it managed to stop such that I had a beautiful view of a little grabby-crane moving enormous, multicoloured piles of cables about. Which was more fun than you might think.



[*] did you see what I managed to avoid doing there?

Comments

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

May I have a kudo for Birds, Bags, Bears and Buns by that well-known poet, Anon? And I'd vote for cormorants, too.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid you do not get a kudo, because beckyl has already been awarded today's kudo (following her remark about the thieving habits of bears).

Although I didn't know offhand who wrote the poem, I didn't know that it was good old Anon. I'd have guessed at AA Milne.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. T'internet claims it as the work of Christopher Isherwood (from his Poems Past and Present). Dunno if this is correct.

[venta.livejournal.com]

A vexed topic, actually, it seems:

http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.co.uk/2002/11/common-cormorant-christopher-isherwood.html

(Various claims on that blog, before the end of the comments descends into weird remarks from people with names like "Penis Enlargement" and "Generic Viagra".)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Seems a bit cheeky for Isherwood to publish it in his own anthology if it really was anon.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

I learned it 60 years ago from Other Men's Flowers, an anthology collated by Field Marshal Earl Wavell and he says "Anon" but like the "incest & folk dancing" quotation, a lot of people claim it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, I would have guessed A A Milne too. Presumably by subconscious association with the poem about bears eating you if you step on the cracks in the pavement.

(If even that one was him, which I'm now suddenly unsure of…)