The first book of the "Night Reading" popular science season is "Evil Bugs", we have learned the "evil" skills of various bugs, full of hair and love. In the second book this time, we will send out the natural enemy of the bugs - birds!
Birdsong Season is a critically acclaimed nature science book based on the BBC Radio 4 programme of the same name. The show's production team consists of several ornithologists and wildlife recordists. It is worth mentioning that the recording engineer's recording of birds in the wild can be said to be painful and happy, and some people even sleep in the reeds all night just to record the moving song. At 5:58 on May 6, 2013, "Birdsong Season" officially began broadcasting with a duration of 90 seconds. Since then, every weekday morning, early risers turn on the radio and hear nature's punctual chimes.
The original English name of "Bird Song Season" is "Tweet of the Day", and "Tweet" is the call of a bird, so we can also call this book "Daily Chirping". Every morning we can be woken up by all kinds of tweets, so when is the peak of tweeting? May. This is the most suitable season for bird watching, and the birds are busy looking for objects, and they are particularly active like chicken blood. This is also the reason why the "Birdsong Season" program was selected to start in May, and the book also uses May as the first chapter, and it is written until April of the following year, with an average of 20 birds selected every month, a total of 247 birds.
Unlike the professional wild bird guide, "Birdsong Season" is quite artistic and reads like natural prose, after all, its original manuscript is broadcast on the radio, and the sense of sound is very important. The two authors, Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss, are well-known British ornithologists, naturalists, and veteran radio and television producers. The famous British painter Cary Acroyid illustrated the book, each of which is a work of art and is collected by major galleries.
"Birdsong Season" has a subtitle - "British Bird Chronicle", although it is written about common birds in Britain, but most of them can be found in China, such as sparrows, house swallows, willow warblers, larks, mandarin ducks, woodpeckers, egrets, seagulls, kestrels, spotted doves... We can compare the book, find the birds that appear around us by month, and scan the code to listen to the birdsong.
Yellow-browed willow warbler
As autumn approaches, the yellow-browed willow warbler, an active bird in October, burrows through the trees and makes a loud and urgent "soo-ee" call. In China, the yellow-browed willow warbler breeds in the northeast, Inner Mongolia and northwest, and migrates to Yunnan, Taiwan, Guangxi, Guangdong and other places in winter. In Zhejiang, these small and exquisite fat chirps (smaller than sparrows) can be found in late autumn to early spring, but it is easy to be confused with its relatives, the yellow-waisted willow warbler, and the yellow-browed willow warbler is particularly active, which is really a test of the equipment and eyesight of the old mage of the bird.
When I checked the information, I found that some netizens always asked how much a bird cost, how to raise it, how to make it scream... Really bad. When you see cute and beautiful wild birds, please restrain your desire to take possession of them, their homes are not in cages, and their calls are not exclusive. "Smelling warblers" also has to be in the "willow waves" of nature.
Xinjiang Songbird (Nightingale)
There are countless birds that are good at singing, the most famous of which is the Xinjiang songbird [qú]. The name may seem a little strange, so let's change the familiar name to nightingale. In The Season of Birdsong, Nightingale appears in May as "Principal Singer of the Bird Symphony Orchestra and Principal Lady of the Opera House". No bird can sing as high-pitched and persistently as a nightingale, "it can switch between different instruments and different genres with great ease, and it can't stop breathing.".
Because of its unparalleled singing, the nightingale is regarded as a bird that celebrates love all day long, maintaining a simple and clear original intention for love, and even willing to give his life for love without hesitation. Wilde wrote in "The Nightingale and the Rose" that in order to let the teenager win the girl's heart with a red rose, the nightingale sang all night with his chest against the spikes of the rose, staining the petals red with blood, and his requirements for the teenager were: to be a real lover.
The nightingale sang to me all night
Oh my God, the nightingale sang outside my window all night:
Alas, wake up, you idiot
Alas, wake up, the girl you love is going to marry someone else tomorrow
Unfortunately, I have not seen the nightingale ben warbler, and we do not have it in the Jiangnan area. Just like the scientific name of the nightingale "Xinjiang Song Bird", in China, we can only find this small bird in the Xinjiang region.
magpie
"Birdsong Season" mentions that the most ordinary-looking birds tend to have the most gorgeous songs. The nightingale sings well, but its appearance has no characteristics, nothing more than a yellow-brown feather of the earth. And a good bird, such as a peacock, its call is difficult to say, or quietly open the screen is better (laughs).
Another example is magpies, their appearance is really handsome, good-looking, elegant posture. If you look closely, you will find that the magpies' feathers are not just black and white, "but green, blue and purple with iridescent colors, and the color changes from time to time with the angle of the light", but their calls are really ... Let's put it this way, magpies are playing with experimental noise. There are one or two noisy magpie couples in each neighborhood, and they can't tell whether they are fighting or playing games, in short, they all sound like they are cursing the street.
In Season of Birdsong, the author calls magpies "garden bullies and street thugs", and although these nicknames are not very friendly, they still praise them as attractive. Magpies are scheduled for January, and they use the sound of "spitting out fire machine guns" to make the cold winters lively.
However, you must not provoke these crows, they have a high IQ, good memory, and may not launch a "poop attack" on you. All we can do is quietly enjoy the avant-garde music brought by the magpie teacher.
When I read Birdsong Season, I kept thinking, what do birds mean to us? How important are they to us?
Birds are so special that with just a chirp they can make romantic poems flow in their pens; just by waving their wings, they can make us feel the changing seasons... Birds always bring us life, inspiration and joy, but what can we do for them?
Know them, get to know them, love them, let them be a free chirp in nature.
Text/Hanzi