Hoopoe

There was a whole bunch of birdwatchers hanging around my street when I got home from work today. Apparently a rare hoopoe bird had been spotted. One of the twitchers showed me a photo he’d taken on his camera of the bird on top of one of my neighbours’ garages. They are a bit bigger than a blackbird and look like this:

According to the RSPB website, the hoopoe does not breed in the UK, but as many as a hundred birds can turn up in spring (mostly seen as single birds) as birds migrating north to Europe from Africa overshoot and land on the south coast of England. When I last checked, Loughborough wasn’t on the south coast and so to see one here is quite a treat.

So I guess it’s understandable why there were about twenty twitchers crowded around. I’m not sure why they felt the need to stand in the middle of the road though.

I was already a bit annoyed having already been reversed into by someone in Tesco car park, but I decided not to use my horn to scare away the birdwatchers. I imagined them sprouting wings and taking flight, their cameras swinging from around their necks.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t get out,’ the woman at Tesco said after she clambered down from her immense 4×4, as if this was some kind of excuse for not checking her mirror before she reversed or indeed being completely oblivious to me leaning on my horn.

In hindsight I should’ve done less leaning and some reversing of my own but I wasn’t quick enough. I didn’t swear and there was no damage done, but I do feel as though there are some idiots in the world. ‘You should try looking in your mirrors before you reverse,’ I said to her. To which she replied indignantly, ‘I said I was sorry.’ Whatevs!

The image of the hoopoe bird is from OpenClipArt.org by the way. The main image on this post is a photo I took while I was in Norway. The water is Oslofjord, the sun was shining for a change, butterflies danced about in the warm air and the scent of the fern trees was lovely. It’s a pity I didn’t have a longer lunch break to allow me to explore some more.

On the flight back from Oslo, a young chap sat next to me reading a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. I was reading Philip K Dick’s Gather Yourselves Together. I was perhaps a little too enthusiastic about Mr Dick’s science fiction, but I feel it’s important to spread the word when the opportunity knocks. He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the flight; I’m not sure if it was his book or my enthusiasm that caused his silence. And yet I don’t regret a thing.

When I got back home I watched the penultimate episode of this season of Game of Thrones, and what a corker it was. I think John Snow’s escape from the walking dead was a little convenient, but what happened to the dragon was super nerdgasmic. I also liked the spiky interplay between the Stark sisters.

Anyway, toodle-pip until next time!