Another April flashback from the recently found card. I miss Grackles so much, cheers me up just looking at them. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Another April flashback from the recently found card. I miss Grackles so much, cheers me up just looking at them. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
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Most wonderful shots of a wonderful bird. I love “colourful black” so much.
Hehe, I decided I need to find out what grackles are called in German.
Stand ready for your daily German lesson. The German name for grackle is……
….Grackel
@2
Reminds me of years ago, when I first started bird-ringing as a volunteer here in Ontario.
As I was arriving at the remote station where I would be working (far out on a sand spit on Lake Eire), a German volunteer was just leaving after a short stay. This volunteer had only been in Canada for about a week at that point, and so was still getting familiar with N.A. birds. Someone asked her what kinds of birds had been around recently, and she said that they had mostly been catching “many Common Crackles.” For some reason, we thought this sounded funny, but appropriate, and between my wife and I, we’ve been calling them “Crackles” ever since.
Love the pompousness and and level of the shiny details.
Grackel is certainly simpler than purppuraturpiaali, also safer to say with a wet mouth.
Ice Swimer/b>
Not too wet a mouth, alternatively -- not too close to your conversation companion. Also, not sure what the turpiaali part means, but I’m pretty sure purppura means “purple” (or similar shade).
In Latvian it’s called pusvārnis, sometimes parastais pusvārnis -- half-crow, or common half-crow. I find it interesting that crow (vārna) is feminine, while half-crow (pusvārnis) takes the masculine ending.
But then, raven (krauklis) and jackdaw (kovārnis -- what-crow) are also masculine, so maybe “crow” is the outlier here…
Didn’t mean to speak so assertively, apologies. <
It seems the Icterid family is called Turpiaalit (the plural of turpiaali, troupial, which seems to be turpial in Spanish). And yes, purppura is purple. The genus Quiscalus is according to Wikipedia Mölyturpiaalit (noisy or noise troupials).
Vārnis isn’t that far away from the Finnish word for crow, varis, though they may not be related words, it’s vares in Estonian (and also in some Finnish dialects).
Interesting. A common (though not popular) boys’ name is Varis, which usually tends to be translated as “one who can” or “the capable” (from the verb varēt, “to can” (I mean, “to be able to” ;) )). But I wonder if there’s a linguistic tie to the finno-ugric languages. After all, there are the Livs…