Bird strike 270118

Class Aves - the birds. I think there are 10,000 different species; maybe twice as many as species of mammals. Some are "right purty" but others are known to birders = twitchers as LBJs little brown jobs; which need some expertise to identify. Still I'm not going to bore you with science; it's just that I've accumulated a handful of links on birds, and that sent me off down a petrel-burrow [petrevious] of connexions:

• Hand-rearing a chick called Albert [species unknown]
• Same guy gets help raising duckling, that would be Anas platyrhynchos
• Chicks start soggy but soon fluff out over the years our girls had 2-3 dozen hatch out on their watch.
• Russian song about the Nightingale Luscinia megarhynchos
• Snowy Owl Bubo scandiacus hanging out on some slobby ice in Ontario
• Starlings Sturnus vulgaris  evade a falcon Falco peregrinus over Cork
• Eagle Aquila audax takes out an annoying drone
• Kingfisher Alcedo atthis snags a fish
• Pied kingfisher Ceryle rudis likewise (more scienciness)
• Mark Roper's breathtaking story about the Kingfisher of Gortrush Wood.
• Not-a-bird Noctilio leporinus hoiking fish out of a pool. [better if you switch off the scripted sound-track]
• Flamingos Phoenicopterus roseus hanging out in an African brine lake 
• Lark ascending Alauda arvensis [Ralph Vaughan Williams] his Gt Uncle was Charles Darwin. I found a lark's nest in the dunes at Warkworth on the Northumberland coast on my birthday in 1984.