I don't see how there can be two kinds of least bittern. I think one of them is the next-to-least.

[mrissa]

On the list of things my grandfather cared about that I only care about indirectly because of him is birds. I am not fond of birds, mostly. Mostly I feel that birds and I are happiest if we keep our distance from each other. But Grandpa liked birds; he kept an eye out for raptors in particular when we were traveling, and when we were fully awake we almost never mistook his cries for, "Look, flying hogs!" Almost never.

So I picked up A Field Guide to the Birds: Eastern Land and Water Birds more or less at random from the top of my stacks of Grandpa books, and oh, you guys, you guys, I may as well be in Narnia here. Or worse, because I have some notion of the characteristics of different kinds of dwarfs and dryads. It started with "Loons: Gaviidae," which is very well and good. I am a northern girl, and we know loons up here, and we have a shopping area named after them, where I have purchased Finnish chocolate and pleasantly shaped rocks and other useful and harmonious things. But before too long we got to sentences like, "Fulmars are more robust than Shearwaters," and I couldn't help but thinking this was all a complex world-building sort of scheme, where the Procellariidae were in contention with the Sulidae for the Emperor's ear. I have no idea how I'm going to get through the rest of this without my brain on auto-pilot making up the differences between the Green Heron and the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron in magical terms, except, of course, that if you are a heron who has been caught by the Queen of Air and Darkness, we have it on good terms that the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron might be the kind to try to impregnate to save your own feathers, especially if you can get her to pull some sort of underwater rose along the way.

I am now wondering what stage of the egg-laying process would count for that.

I expect this will be much easier when I'm reading Grandpa's books about Marines, except it will probably be quite a bit more terrifying if it's not.

Comments

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I couldn't help but thinking this was all a complex world-building sort of scheme, where the Procellariidae were in contention with the Sulidae for the Emperor's ear.

Tell me when you get that published, because I will be all over it.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

ME TOO.

[guppiecat]

Clearly you need some starter books to help bridge the gaps.

I recommend A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North America and Another Field Guide to Little Known and Seldom Seen Birds of North America.

Failing those, there is an older book available online for free here

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oh my. My parents had a later edition of that, I sort of grew up on it.

[pameladean]

I think we have it now; I'd have to check.

P.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

And why not think of it all in magical terms? :)

Think of what a wonderful YA book that would be, Magic in the Kingdom of Birds.

[guppiecat]

You'd want to also have a nice back story for the time when the birds ruled the world, and then something bad happened and almost all of them were wiped out and had to cast a species flight spell to survive (which had CONSEQUENCES)... so now, much smaller and sans-teeth, they have to defend themselves against the same creatures that once were their prey.

Two things

[redbird]

First, you're doing something akin to reading through your grandfather's copy of the most recent Merriam-Webster desk dictionary, or maybe a cookbook. Birders may browse occasionally, but we don't read through the whole thing (though we may look up one bird and wind up reading about another, just as I may follow cross-references through the pages of a dictionary). Does your project "read Grandpa's books" include, or need to include, "even the ones he didn't read, but looked things up in?

Second, there are groups of birds that even the birders sort of lump together as very hard to tell apart: it's like asking a botanist to identify a flower and being told "that's a DYC." DYC=damned yellow composite=there are a hundred kinds of this in this desert and I can't tell them apart either.

Re: Two things

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Birders may browse occasionally, but we don't read through the whole thing (though we may look up one bird and wind up reading about another, just as I may follow cross-references through the pages of a dictionary).

I was aware of that.

Re: Two things

[pameladean]

Birders as a whole don't, but one of my partners does.

Your description of reading the bird guide sounds exactly the way that I feel about reading about sports.

P.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

Nora's animal discrimination is such that all animals are puppies (most non-cat mammals), kitties (cats large and small, and birds), bunnies (bunnies and roughly bunny-shaped animals) and Those for Which There is No Name (fish, reptiles, amphibians). So it's great watching her page through bird guides, pointing to the birds and exclaiming "kitty" for each, much to the consternation of her grandmas.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you know how kitties and birds got to be the same group? I wish I knew. It seems like the child-logic I can make up for it is that she has probably seen kitties (both birds and cats) jumping through the air but has not seen as much of that in puppies (by which I mean elephants and badgers). But that is a total adult retcon wild-assed guess.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

It's hard to say... For one thing, the categories she can produce words for are far more limited than her internal categories as evidenced by her actions. I think she knows the difference between kitties and bird, but doesn't have different words yet.

I'm also not sure that she really knows what the line-and-watercolor illustrations of animals in her books are trying to convey. So when we get into animals she's only seen in books, such as elephants, she has very little data to use to identify the animal pictured.

That said, I think it's a combination of how they move, and the ratio of body parts. Puppy legs tend to be thicker and more integrated into the body shape whereas kitties tend to be a body on top of legs. Dogs are shaggier whereas kitties are sleeker.

The categorizations are also rather fluid, since her vocabulary is exploding. After she learned puppy, everything was a puppy for a little while, before kitty came back in a more limited usage. Bunnies just got a name last week. She's been calling her polar bear "bo" for several weeks now, and she has just started using bo for other bears as well. Cows, pigs, and sheep will pobably get their own words next, as they are featured in several of her favorite books.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So there's a certain amount of, "Kitty. Thingy. Um, whatsit, kinda like that, come on, adult person, you know what I mean!" going on.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

Exactly.