The Bluestocking women's Pub- spring is sprunging and MN's name generator can do one!

[lcakethereforeIam]

Welcome to the Bluestocking women's pub. Men are directed to the Staunch Ally just down the road. Otherwise all are welcome. Pull up a chair, give your order to the Wait Gerbil or the Gerbil behind the bar.

Don't forget to name change if you wish to.

So cute. I can confidently say I have never seen, or heard of, one of those.

I paired the sound clip.

The cat just ran in looking for the bird in the living room!

I'm not great on birdsong apart from the old reliable blackbirds and thrushes and robins, and wrens sometimes.
I know a chiffchaff, for obvious reasons, and which bird goes Teacher Teacher Teacher?

Easier to hear than identify by sight - they are what are technically known as ‘Little Brown Jobs’.

great tit? I think it sounds like a squeaky gate or wheel; coal tits are their smaller counterpart a bit higher and faster.

Great crested grebes have just been seen catching, drowning and, with difficulty, eating chiffchaffs! The chiffchaff were catching insects by the water's edge and the grebes snuck up.

(wtf do you get your news from?)

😱

I think this was Google, it flagged an article in the BBC Wildlife magazine. I'd have kept it to myself but a pp mentioned chiffchaff.

Learning that water rails will catch and eat small passerines, that was a free copy of British Birds someone gave me several decades ago.

According to a (now late) farmer, formerly of my acquaintance, otters will take young lambs given half a chance. Nature is reliably red in tooth and claw.

@ErrolTheDragon I heard my first chiffchaff of the year today too. I'd taken B&B down to the meadows on a friend's farm where we're allowed to wander, and there it was, announcing its arrival. I also got a glimpse of what was either a very large and oddly coloured muntjac, or a roe, noping off out of the next meadow well ahead of B&B's arrival.

We have masses of skylarks here, and they've been very loud this spring.

Nah, I think it will be worth it.
We've had several attempted break ins of our solvent store, presumably wannabe Walter Whites, unsuccessful so far. We only store waste solvent (mixed) in there. This will make for some interesting chemistry if they ever manage to get in.

o m g I haven't seen/heard any chiffchaffs or swallows yet, I am very cross at the idea of the g c grebes eating them all!

On this day 11 years ago I was sitting outside in the garden beside a dog crate, observing the stray cat I'd been feeding all week go right to the very edge of it while he gobbled down the contents of a little foil tray. Six days earlier he didn't dare come nearer than 10 metres away, but gradually, day after day, he (or, at that stage I thought maybe she) was coming closer and closer. And I'd spoken to the vet . . .

I checked the calendar, and Easter Sunday was on April 5th in 2015 as it is this year.

'water rails will catch and eat small passerines'

- one of those 'only in the Bluestocking' sentences😁

[unless of course there's a birdwatching thread - I don't stray beyond the Bluey and the Shopping thread, the latter for a comforting alternative to the problems of the world!]

They're mutually intelligible. There are some lexical and grammatical differences but I'm told that - for example - when young folk from those countries go on holiday and meet people from those areas they'll say something like "Let's speak 'in ours'" and they'll understand one another.

There can be problems with false friends, however. I hope that I'm getting this right...

In Serbian, a suitcase is 'kofer'; in Croatian it can be kofer or 'kovčeg'. However, the latter in Serbian is the word for a coffin. (It can also mean 'chest' in both languages.)

You see online jokes about how people from former Yugoslavia are so clever that they now speak 4 languages where they used to know one...

The Slovenes have their own language, where the grammar is, IMO, more complicated - they have (I recall) a dual verb. Macedonian is also different, but you'll get Bulgarians claiming that it's 'only bad Macedonian'. All the languages are related.

Before Yugoslavia broke up, kids would be required to learn Serbo-Croatian at school in addition to their native language, so - for example - Melania Trump would be fluent in both Slovene and Serbo-Croatian. The same for Macedonian kids.

As I understand it, the other kids just learned their own variant but were made aware of other variants through literature. Kids in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were expected to learn both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. I'm not sure about the other countries

I saw some young folk discussing this online yesterday and some of the Croats were saying that they'd learned Cyrillic out of interest, but that it's not taught in schools now. I think they said that their parents had to learn it in school.

If you look at posters and whatnot from the Communist era, Tito had two signatures - one in Cyrillic and one in Latin. (Tito was a Croat, though I've seen rumours that he was a Russian doppelganger...)

In Serbian, a suitcase is 'kofer'; in Croatian it can be kofer or 'kovčeg'.

Koffer in German.

No chiffchaffs or sky larks here in Argyll&Bute yet but Sunday morning I watched a crow chase a flock of terns around. That was one angry crow, not sure what the terns had done to it.

Yes, I have family in former Yugo.

Confusingly, I recently discovered that the family originated in Hungary, but seemed to spend a great deal of time fleeing the Ottoman Empire.

Our local rookery has been incredibly noisy lately, even by normal rookery standards. And they've terrorised everything else. Although there was a robin observing my lesson this morning (from outside the window). Not sure what it took from the experience.

Both languages do a lot of borrowing.

"Office" is "kancelarija" in Serbian, but "ured" in Croatian. However, I could swear that I saw "ofis" when I used Croatian subtitles when watching Netflix one time.

In both languages, if I don't know a word then I try the English, followed by the French and then German...

To my ear, Croatian sounds closer to Russian in terms of pronunciation. Serbian has longer vowel sounds. (Whereas a Scot speaking Russian has vowel sounds that are closer - apart from the 'oo', in Serbian an English speaker's vowel sounds come across as being more accurate. The 'r' is a different matter...)

Sorry. When I did my Russian degree in the last century, one of the options was Comparative Slavonic Philology. I've retained just enough to be able to bore people to death.

I know it's just nature doing what nature does, but... 😧😥

I did have crows at one point, but now that I'm down to one big tree (and some little 'uns) the magpies claim the Picea Omorika. I still see wood pigeons and crows, but I don't think that they can be nesting in the same tree as the magpies.

My robin tends to disappear in spring. I'm assuming she's gone to her mate's territory. I do see blue tits, coal tits and great tits in the dwarf(ish) cherry, but they've never taken advantage of a nesting box here.

I did once have bumble bees taking up residence in one of them. Last year, some kind of smallish bumble bee took up residence in my front porch, going in and out of a tiny gap in the cement. They never bothered me, so I just left them to get on with it.

I admit that I knock down wasp nests when I see them. They have a habit of trying to build inside the garden hut and —last year in the chimney. I'm afraid that I committed murder in the case of the chimney wasps. I just kept scooshing wasp killer up the lum until the angry buzzing stopped.

I feel a bit guilty, but...

I'll add that I'd have left the wasp nest alone if it had been in a nesting box or in a bush. I couldn't leave the queen who kept trying to construct her nest just inside the hut at the doorway. I didn't hurt her, but I kept apologising. I think she gave up at the third attempt.

I murdered the chimney wasps because they'd got through the chimney cap and were coming out through the fireplace...Only a few, but I couldn't risk leaving them.

We’ve had tree bees occupying an old nest box.

Im enjoying this thread moving between ornithology, entomology and so to etymology - I don’t think I’d ever clocked the link between coffee and coffin before. I do enjoy finding these links; a couple of days ago it dawned on me for the first time that ‘river’ derives from ‘rive’ - obvious when you think about it!

There's lots of different species of solitary bees. They're solitary because each one has its own nest but some will nest in colonies. Lots of nests clustered together. Osmia rufa (red mason bee) is common, and so cute. Fascinating life cycle and important pollinators of fruit trees because they're on the wing so early. We had them nesting in the mortar of my parents house until they had it repointed.

I believe there are ancient potter wasp nests in Correlejo, Fuerta Ventura. They're made from mud so, according to Wikipedia, it indicates it was once much wetter there. I was told Correlejo is the Western end of the Sahara. I'd love to see a nest. A teeny clay vase. They're found in this country, but not by me.

And coffers (as in filling the coffers) in English, a traditional wooden chest for storing valuables.