A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.

Will the pigeon get the cat’s food, or will the cat get the pigeon?

Birdies that ain’t.

The pros of walking to Barcelona Airport.

Urohydrosis.

I hope to post interviews and analysis soon.

It’s no longer a swinging safari now the nature-lovers have got guns too.

Is it on a mission from God?

And what to do when those boring old marble columns get in the way of your new staircase.

Statues are designed to be bird-friendly on the orders of a mysterious avian deity, which may have held sway over Luis Buñuel.

I can’t see the moral difference between this and when your cat brings in a vole, but someone is outraged.

So they’ve posted a report alleging Sir John Moore’s defeat by the weather, 200 years ago. It’s snowing a bit in Spain at the moment, but no signs of it turning into a repeat of 1829-30, when the Ebro froze, 1835-6, when eggs froze in their shells in Palencia, 1836-7, when it snowed on the [...]

So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a [...]

The following description of birdsong contests is taken from Josep Pla’s brilliant anecdotography of Rafael Puget, Un señor de Barcelona, and is mid- to late-19th century ():
Singing competitions
A fondness for birdsong has existed in Manlleu, Barcelona province for as far back as my memory reaches. The “Societat d’aucellistes”, the Society of Bird-Fanciers, is very old [...]

Yesterday in town it was remarked on the benefits to allkind that would accrue from exchanging our customary diet of Big Macs for one of roadkill and Fucking pigeon (what’s the Latin?). Celtiberians consulted state that their race does not partake of the pigeon, and Juan Bautista Carrasco’s Mitología universal (1864) suggests that this may [...]

San Juan de Plan, Huesca, Spanish Pyrenees. You’ll have to twirl your machine 90º until Google Video start doing online rotation:
Tiny Tim started out as the Human Canary and died in the arms of Miss Sue after playing his appalling hit, Tip-toe thru the tulips, at the Women’s Club Of Minneapolis on November 30 1996. [...]

Wood ants descending rapidly en masse from a Quercus ilex on Montseny at the onset of a sharp shower:

Having spent several decades standing under trees waiting for the rain to stop, it is my firm belief that small ants do not flee from the rain as do big ones, although their level of activity [...]

I was having a chat about stuff with Pete Doherty this morning, and he tells me that because of the common genetic ancestry of most of the races of the Milky Way galaxy, many species are able to interbreed with or without the help of genetic technology. In fact dogs and doves are quite similar, [...]

T Bell, MD, Kalogynomia, or the laws of female beauty (1821):
Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen, whose profound science and perfect impartiality no one can doubt, does not hesitate to say, that the English are the most beautiful people on the globe. Nor is this wonderful when we consider that ENGLAND, perhaps exclusively, presents the combination [...]

Dead playing pheasant (gamekeeper’s grave on the N estate in what used to be called Central Southern England before Labour, inspired by Norman Tebbit’s dad’s bicycle, decided to demolish the entire north and rebuild it in Southeast England, which unfortunately turned out to be a tad small for the exercise):

Keepers’ memorials like the above are [...]