Pursuing my current birdy obsession the other day, I was trawling through amazon in search of books about bitterns, and found a total of one: Lord William Percy’s 1951 study Three Studies in Bird Character: Bitterns, Herons and Rails. Annoyingly, the copy I bought hasn’t turned up yet, but in the mean time I can’t resist reproducing this picture I found here of a water rail, known to John Clare (since I mentioned him the other day) as the ‘water craik’, and a species with the most unusual habit of carrying its young in its beak. What a fine photograph.
The bittern features in Raymond Briggs's wonderful Fungus the Bogeyman.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see a duck
ReplyDeleteOut of my window
I sometimes say hello
Pearly feathers
Soggy bread
Oh look
There goes one now
Hello