SEnine
Bird Rational Herbaceous
doesn’t travel well and, on a recent holiday to Spain, was irked one evening by a bird making an unnecessary racket perched close to his hotel room window.
With the heart of a true naturalist, the grumpy tourist was just about to lob a sharp object in its direction when he spotted something a little unusual.
Instead of it being a crow with a foreign accent, at the end of the familiar black body he noticed a downward curved red beak that he recognised as belonging not to a crow but a chough, a relation common in Iberia, but one of England’s rarest birds.
It occurred that the chough, a familiar site nesting on the cliff s of central Spain, would be something of a celebrity back in London, probably attracting fl eets of thermos-carrying twitchers.
he’d ever seen, clustered in a tree and completely ignored by the local population, who clearly considered them something of a pest.
However, the bright red, green and blue lorikeets were a highlight of the
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HERBACEOUS
A similar thing had happened on a work trip some years back to Australia, kindly paid for by unwitting taxpayers, in furtherance of his vital work in the service of the crown.
In a park in central Adelaide, he noticed some of the most exotic wild birds
holiday, sorry, work trip, for Herbaceous. Now that fl uorescent green parakeets have become common in London, we too are taking exotic coloured birds for granted.
A bird which is mid-way between zero and hero is the sparrow, common in some streets and a rare visitor in others where it’s started to be held in high esteem, the cheerful chattering having been absent for too long.
Entering one of his mind-bending meditations on this topic, Herbaceous pondered the relationship between rarity and popularity and whether this might be applied to his own activities.
For example, perhaps he was buying too many rounds and washing up too often to be truly popular in the pub and at home? Only time will tell on that theory.
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