Birds

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, August 2024

Can the GOP do normal? I switched from Dem to Rep in 2014 after the disasters of the Obama presidency and the Dems’ loony hatred of the West and the US became clear. Since then I’ve not voted for the Rep nominee for president once, although I have voted for Reps down the ballot and have written in a Rep for president each cycle. I’m looking forward to the day when the GOP’s weird swooning over the orange one is over. - Thomas Nienow ‘Justice’ and the fall of a republic Great article and I hope you’re wrong.

letters

Monday

Parker Bauer

The American Ornithological Society’s war on the past

Say you’re easing along a meadow stream, upslope but not steep, somewhere in the Rockies. It’s a morning in spring, the mountains ahead still mostly snowy against a blue sky. A bird sings, giving itself away in a clump of alder. New to birding, you’re naive but full of hope, and through the binoculars you find a thing with feathers, small and olive with yellow breast and black cap. A Wilson’s warbler, says the field guide with its nifty pictures, and you feel the satisfaction of putting a name to a part of the profusion of nature. You’re out there — need it be said? — for the peace, and the bird, deftly identified, is a totem of tranquility.

ornithological

Tuesday

Andrew McKean

Exploring the decline of Britain’s birds

You can forgive those Brits who forget they live on an island. Motorways, next-day delivery and WiFi all distance residents of the United Kingdom from the physical margins of their country, but the limitations of geography are at the heart of a rhapsodic book that traces the astonishing declines of the British Isles’ native birds. In Search of One Last Song is the debut book by Patrick Galbraith, the editor of Shooting Times, the UK’s largest-circulation hunting and shooting publication. This earthy travelogue transports readers to foggy moors and wind-blasted coastlines and gentle fields across Great Britain as Galbraith pursues leads of flocks in utter trouble.

birds

Tuesday

Cockburn

WATCH: is Joe Biden America’s luckiest president?

Who knew Joe Biden was so fortunate? Forget inflation, gas prices, the prospect of World War Three, his regular memory lapses and his son’s indiscretions: it seems the 46th president is in fact the luckiest man in America — as evidenced by the appearance of a bird pooping on him while he delivered a speech on Tuesday. President Biden was at the podium in deep-red Iowa, where his aim was to “visit an ethanol plant, pledge to use executive tools to throttle inflation and explain to his audience how Washington is helping rural communities,” according to the Hill. But if anyone really hit their mark that day, it was the winged assassin above the president, despoiling his sports jacket from a range of several feet... https://twitter.

biden bird