Makes more sense I suppose. And therein lies the key to increased traffic ...
Anyway, I went to hang out washing this morning and ended up doing some gardening. I couldn't find a shears or secateurs so I pruned my hellebores with a scissors.
I'd like to point out that I was responsible for planting the hellebores - after becoming enamoured of them on Rosalie's site - and they are one of the few plants that has survived my attentions. Husband does most of the gardening as I am infamously bad at nurturing plants. I'm only good at clearing gardens. So I am rather pleased with my success. They have flourished year by year in spite of - or maybe because of - my inattention. I hope the pruning doesn't upset them.
And what I wonder is the collective noun for long-tailed tits. There must be one as they always travel in gangs.
You can only see two in this picture but there must have been about seven of them altogether. they are the cutest little things.
P.S. The RSPB simply calls them a flock; other alternatives put forward include volery (most popular) and zephyr.
P.P.S. Who comes up with collective noun words for birds anyway? Who decided it should be a murder of crows or an asylum of cuckoos?
5 comments:
Beautiful blossoms, Liz. I'm jealous of your spring-like flowering. As to your long-tailed tits, "Collective nouns for Birds" on the Country Life website there in UK suggests, "A banditry of titmice".
Cop Car
Mine has to be 'a murmuration of starlings'. We're lucky enough to get them over the town most years.
No hellebores here yet. Too grey, soggy and cold for anything at all.
A zephyr of long-tailed tits . . . a lovely phrase! Of course, here in North America, no birds are called tits, which means something entirely different.
We have crocuses and snowdrops just about to flower in our garden as well, Cop Car, and I've seen my first flowering daffodil of the year. Yes, there were some lovely nouns in the Country Life list.
I've never seen a proper murmuration, Sonata, but i would like to.
It does here too, Debra, which is why one tongue-in-cheek collective was a droop of tits.
From Wikipedia: "While commonly referred to as "tits" throughout much of the English-speaking world, these birds are called either "chickadees" (onomatopoeic, derived from their distinctive "chick-a dee dee dee" alarm call)[1] or "titmice" in North America. The name titmouse is recorded from the 14th century, composed of the Old English name for the bird, mase (Proto-Germanic *maison, German Meise), and tit, denoting something small. The former spelling, "titmose", was influenced by mouse in the 16th century.[2] Emigrants to New Zealand presumably identified some of the superficially similar birds of the genus Petroica of the family Petroicidae, the Australian robins, as members of the tit family, giving them the title tomtit, although, in fact, they are not related."
I (in the USA) am familiar with a "titmouse", "bushtit", and "titlark".
Cop Car
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