I HAVE mentioned our sparrows before and I must come back to them.
They are very entertaining little birds and they are pretty much ubiquitous, so we all get to enjoy them.
They make full use of the ablution facilities and the free meals we provide, coming down in numbers to bath, drink and eat.
They can best be described as irascible, they seem to be constantly bickering among themselves, shoo-ing each other out of the bird bath or away from the seed on the ground.
They come to mind because we’ve just re-watched that superb actor, Kenneth Branagh, in the full length version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it’s quite amazing just how many of our everyday expressions come from the play.
But, we’ve just picked up a new one from Hamlet himself, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”.
It is just before his famous bout with Laertes culminating in all and sundry dying violent deaths, and his reference to the sparrow is perhaps a premonition of his own death.
Anyway, thank you, Master Shakespeare, you too, along with the sparrows, are a constant source of entertainment.
Staying in Shakespeare country, a new survey has revealed that three more species of birds have been added to the list of endangered species in Britain – puffins, nightingales and curlews.
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This brings to 67 the number of red listed bird species in the UK, more than a quarter of the total species of birds found there.
No specific reasons were given for the growing number of endangered species, but it is fairly safe to say that climate change and habitat destruction would have a lot to do with it.*
Interesting to note that the number of bird species recorded as breeding in Britain or as regular visitors is just 240.
This must be compared to the nearly 900 species we have in South Africa.
I may have mentioned this before, but I remember walking next to a trout stream just outside London with my cousin years ago and he cried out, “Look, there’s a swallow!” and I asked naively, “Yes, but which one?”
It turns out that they have just one in Britain, while we have no fewer than 10.
Finally, a report that has landed on my desk points out that we humans are not the only farmers growing their own food, there are several species in the animal world which do as well.
They include the leaf-cutter ant, which cultivates underground fungi farms, as indeed do ambrosia beetles in tunnels bored into rotten wood, while termites grow fungi in their huge ant hills.
Then there are marsh snails, which also cultivate their own fungi food (think of the fuss we make about a specific fungi, mushrooms).
Spotted jellyfish allow algae to grow as a photosynthetic crop on their body tissue, damsel fish grow and viciously defend a particular variety of algae, and yeti crabs encourage edible bacteria to grow on their claws.**
*Sources: The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media; Birds of Britain and Europe, 1974, Roberts Bird Guide, 2007, and Andy Ruffle of Birdlife Trogans.
**Care2Causes
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