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A Strange Sort Of Pigeon

Posted Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 17:37

After my praise of his work designing handwriting fonts, I had a pleasant note from Brian Willson. Another of his passions is birding, and he keeps a regular blog of his sightings on the Maine (N.E. USA) coast, listing all the birds he sees every day, a self-appointed task that fills me with awe.

He gets to see many more birds than we do in London or in Harlech. I love birds, though I’m not a twitcher, and Brian’s blog set me to thinking how I first fell for them.

I was six years old. I was looking out of my father’s study window when I saw a strange bird on the lawn. “Daddy, what’s that?” I cried. He glanced up for a moment, then went back to his papers. “It’s a pigeon,” he muttered.

At six you don’t know a lot, but I knew enough to realise that few pigeons were orange, with black and white striped wings, a long curved bill and a spectacular crest. Up till that time my father’s pronouncements made the Pope look fallible, but this planted the first seeds of doubt in my inchoate mind.

Of course, this is what I saw:

It was a Hoopoe, Upupa epops, and I took this photograph many years later (2004, actually) of a hoopoe emerging from her nest in a wonderful Spanish folly belonging to our friends Shaunagh and Crispin Latymer.

That Christmas I was given Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe and I became obnoxious on the subject.

The following year for a test at school Mr Walker asked us, a class of seven year olds, to write down the names of four birds. I carefully wrote

lammergeier
hoopoe
ortolan
chough

and failed the test because Mr Walker thought I’d made up the words.

What a little prick I was.

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2 Responses to “A Strange Sort Of Pigeon”

  1. Ric Morris Says:
    April 9th, 2010 at 14:02

    No Gwyn, you were alright. In fact what a prick Mr Walker was. One would have thought that he may have had a reasonable knowledge of birds to even think of setting such a question. In that event I’d have thought he would know exactly what they all were. If he had not, fancy setting kids such a question without having a bird book on his desk ready to research the answers, however incredible they may have seemed. Fancy failing a seven year old without even bothering to look up just one of those words. I suspect you got the third letter of his surname wrong.

  2. Fred Says:
    April 12th, 2010 at 14:12

    Way I shee it, shun, I’d shay it was that dangblasted teacher who wuz the prick. Ain’t no excuse fer a teacher not knowin what an ortolan is.
    Ol Granpa Nolan.

    (BTW whut’s an ortolan?)


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