If you ever go on holiday to Togo or Chad and think you hear Chogstable twittering his head off at 4:30am ~ you're not going crazy. It might actually be Chogstable himself! Nightingales winter in Western and Central Africa, returning here by mid-April (so how come I first spotted Chogstable in January? Looking like a small thrush without the speckles (ie just like a nightingale), hanging out around dense vegetation ie behaving just like a nightingale. Every night I spotted him around the same tree he sings in today.) How could Chogstable be here, when he ought to have been having a chirp in some mango-grove in Gabon?The little nightingales are said to cross the Sahara Desert in one fell swoop (so to speak) sleeping as they fly (which some birds can do), thrumming their tiny wings nonstop. On they flutter, across the Straits of Gibraltar or wider Mediterranean Sea, finally touching down for a long-overdue roost in Southern Spain or Italy.
May is said to be the best month to hear nightingale song, when the birds are breeding. In June, they are tending their nests of babies as couples. By July they take to the skies once more, thrum-thrum-thrumming away, off to their second homes and luxury gîtes along the Gold Coast, the Côte d'Ivoire or the Congo or Volta rivers...
Actually having read their supposed migration-timetable, which implies they ping too and from Africa not once a year, but twice. I'm confused. If anyone has better information, please let me know...
LINKS:
Wikipedia nightingale
Wikipedia nachtigall
Springerlink: First arrival dates of nightingale to Central Croatia
Any good videos (if I can find 'em) und Deutsche Übersetzung kommen später/coming later.
SPEAKING OF SINGERS
This is pretty remarkable:
ROSLYN KIND: CAN YOU READ MY MIND
What do you think of her voice? Whose does her singing remind you of?
An old clip:
7 comments:
My mom wouldn't really kick my sister out but the threat was there; I think that's an unsolicited threat no matter the cause unless causing harm to the family.
And I have many Christian friends with tattoos. I know a lot of people who think tattoos aren't Christian either but piercings aren't any different in that aspect, in my opinion. I think that all comes down to interpretation (unfortunately).
I think I'm just too much of a wuss to get one LOL
I was told never to get one because I'm too apt to change my mind...
... I remember being all up for jumping into "shark-infested" waters at night because I thought a shark's mouth scar across the torso would look really cool. Then I was told there was more likely to be jellyfish in there and I ran a mile!
I think the ancient Israelites were told not to deliberately mark their skin and that's where the antitattoo thing comes from. It's only been since the 1990s that they've been a fashion for ordinary people. Before that they tended to be associated with "rough types" and old sailors.
Well that's how I remember it. Also piercing became a big thing in the 1990s. Madonna had a nose-ring around 1994. I think she'd got rid of it by 1998.
Before body-piercing it was ear piercing. Remember Madonna's 12 in each ear in the early 80s?
O she was a fashion-victim. And a tart!
I've never heard a nightingale...one day I will, though.
Talking of tats, my granddaughter has just had her birth sign tattood on her ribs...she's a Scorpio. I would never willingly ask anyone to inflict pain on me...
... not even for a beautiful, lifelong, artistic, treasured momento...
... one that will eventually lose its shape and fade to a wrinkled, flabby shade of bottle-green ~ no matter how bright the original design?
!
Just saying hi, Gledds. Nice post.
Love you.
Chogstable says:
twit twit twit
jug jug jug
tereu!
TS Eliot says:
oi, you nicked my bloody poem!
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