Tag: birds

tastes like pigeon

I try not to walk around while looking at my phone, after all, there are already far too many ‘candid’ videos online of people walking into glass doors, lamp posts and fountains while checking their emails and text messages. But when I am trying to find a meeting location in an unfamiliar place, I admit I am sometimes guilty of paying less attention to my surroundings than to the smart phone maps.

Although it meant I missed getting a better photo, I think I am probably glad the seagull in the photo was more alert than I was and quickly dragged his meal out of my way before I could fall over it or him.

It seems that it’s a bird-eat-bird world out there.

swanning around

Once more, my head seems to be stuffed so full of cotton wool, clouds or feathers that there’s no room for a single useful or original thought.

I do have a set of rather lovely photos of swans I took recently but I think pretty much everything I’ve written that features birds, feathers or flight has already appeared on the blog at some point, so I’m lacking words to accompany the pictures.

I would have thought that swans should be inspirational and make writing easy as the adult female is a pen. These, though, seem to be mute swans.
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autumn birds

A gust of wind startles
all the yellow birds of autumn
from their treetop perches

The idea of autumn leaves as birds is a recurrent theme for me, and I’ve posted several variations on the blog over the years, though not that exact phrasing, I don’t think. But it isn’t just flying leaves that are notable at this time of year.
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day’s end

The day’s nearly over, but I still have time to publish a post commemorating the anniversary of the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. The main image above is a detail from a stained glass window he designed for St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham.

I knew I had a photo of one of the Burne-Jones windows, but had forgotten that it was entitled The Last Judgement. Now its subject matter has reminded me of the sky I photographed one evening recently, which was a beautiful, if somewhat disturbing, brimstone yellow.
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hic sunt dracones

scarlet snapdragonI have a soft spot for dragons. Especially red ones. So naturally I stopped to photograph these flowers when I saw them in the park yesterday.

Then I found something even more dragon-like:
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counting chickens

The train’s delayed and while I wait,
I gauge my luck – or lack thereof –
in magpies: the furl of caping wings,
and splay-tailed swoop to perch
high in the winter cage of track-side trees
whose trunks are evergreened by ivy.

 
The magpies were too far away to get a photo, but this blackbird seemed to think that if he sat still enough I wouldn’t notice him.

blackbird in bare branches

rivers

Thames at dusk looking east from Somerset House

 
River Severn

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