FEED THE BIRDS

Photo: Brian Sibley © 2019

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

A few avian inhabitants of the Zoological Society of London...

 

 

Photo: © David Weeks & Brian Sibley 2018

THE CORMORANTS OF VENICE

It is a common sight in Laguna di Venezia (and here in le Canal de la Giudecca) to see cormorants perched atop the stanchions, opening and closing their wings. Whilst spending their lives in and on the water, a cormorant's feathers are not waterproof, hence their need to dry them after fishing. In past centuries, these fisher-birds were themselves hunted on the Lagoon in what has been described as a form of underwater falconry. Just such a hunt was depicted some 500 years ago by Vittore Carpaccio...

 But the cormorant has another Venetian connection via the Bard. Wanting a name for the villain of his play, The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare selected Shylock.

The Shakespearean scholar, Sir Israel Gollancz (1863-1930) notes:

The book which was read by Elizabethans for everything relating to the later Jewish history, and which went through edition after edition, was Peter Morwyng's translation of the pseudo-Josephus, A compendious and most marveylous History of the latter Times of the Jewes Commune Weale... In Marlowe's Jew of Malta, and elsewhere in the plays of Elizabethan dramatists, the influence of the book can be detected. 

Near the beginning of the History we read: "About that time it was signified also to them of Jerusalem that the Askalonites had entered in friendship with the Romans. They sent therefore Neger the Edomite, and Schiloch the Babylonian [my italics], and Jehochanan, with a power of the common people; these came to Askalon, and besieged it a great space. Within the town was a Roman captaine called Antonius, a valiant man, and a good warrior." 

This passage, suggests Gollancz, may well account not only for 'Shylock' but also for 'Antonio', the Merchant of the title.

And Shakespeare, the inveterate player with words, may have also made another connection: the Hebraic word for 'cormorant' is 'shalak', (meaning 'plunging' or 'darting down') as can be seen in the list of forbidden, 'unclean' creatures listed in Leviticus 11: 17...

¹² Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is to be regarded as unclean by you. ¹³ These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, ¹⁴ the red kite, any kind of black kite, ¹⁵ any kind of raven, ¹⁶ the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, ¹⁷ the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, ¹⁸ the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, ¹⁹ the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

The cormorant, because of its voracious appetite, also came to be a symbol of usury as can be seen from a 16th Century reference to attempts to rescue "poor debtors" from usurers and "the claws of such cormorant harpies".

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, may, therefore, owe some aspect of his name to the shalak, the cormorant of Laguna di Venezia, that would have been a familiar sight both to him and to Antonio, the Merchant of Venice...


Photos: © David Weeks 2015

WHAT A CARRY-ON!

It was June 1939 and the world was teetering on the brink of war.

In the United Kingdom, the Government's Ministry of Information was preparing for what now seemed an inevitability. It was widely predicted that, in the event of war, major cities in Britain could be subjected to German air bombardment deploying poisoned gas. What was needed was a campaign to confront these public fears and boost morale in the face of impending death and disaster.

2,500,000 copies of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster – its slogan surmounted by a Tudor crown – were printed between 23 August 1939 and 3 September 1939 but, despite hostilities beginning on 1 September, it was decided that the poster should be held back for use following the first serious air-raids.

Instead, two other posters were produced for distribution...

However, the campaign was not a success: people criticised it as a waste of money and its slogans as patronising and it was abandoned in October 1939 with the stocks of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster being pulped as part of a paper salvage drive.

It was 2000 that Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary, of Barter Books Ltd, came across a surviving copy of the poster and displayed over the cash register in their shop. It caught people's imaginations and the Manleys were soon reproducing and selling copies.

This was the beginning of what has developed into a mega-industry in which the poster has been parodied, adapted and hijacked for several thousand alternative versions that have been reproduced on a legion of commercial products (cards, mugs, tea-pots, aprons, t-shirts, cuff-links and iPhone covers) that – depending on your view – have either provided inspiring and amusing comments on contemporary society or have trivialised and bastardised a relic of a momentous event in the history of the twentieth century.

 

 
Just when I had begun to think that the 'Keep Calm' joke had really worn more than a trifle thin (despite my own use of it in the sidebar on the right!), along comes a version that really made me LAUGH!

My friend, Sheila Shrigley (incidentally one of the calmest people I know!) spotted this sign on the cage of a Eurasian Griffon Vulture at the International Centre for Birds of Prey in Duncombe, Yorkshire...

Brilliant!

PENGUIN POUND

Spotted by Roger on Monday during the demolition of the Somerset House Christmas Ice Rink...

Illegal immigrants awaiting deportation?

Actually, I like the photo SO much,

I've decided that it must be our New Year

CAPTION COMPETITION!! 

Enter NOW!! Closing date: 19 January 2014


Photo: Roger Shrigley

PICK OF THE PIX: SWAN

Another favourite photograph, this time from 2006: a swan on the Serpentine at sunset...

PICK OF THE PIX: SILVER AND GOLD

Somebody recently made a favourite of this photo from my flicker photostream. Following a two-day storm on the Canaveral Coast of Florida in 1999, the wind and rain suddenly abated and I got up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the sea.

Sitting on the deserted but still rain-sodden sand, I was rewarded by the company of  this lone heron engaged on an early morning fishing expedition: a beautiful encounter that I will never forget...

ANIMAL KIND

Following on from my posting about the new Cartoon Museum exhibition, Animal Crackers...

Literature and pop culture is full of instances of animals masquerading as humans or humans donning animal masks for our entertainment: just think of the creature-gods of Ancient Egypt or the animal-people encountered by Alice in Wonderland and Looking-glass Country...

Or the indefatigable Rupert Bear and his kin...

A contemporary manifestation of this curious obsession is found in the work of Charlotte Cory who has created a unique collection of cartes de visite that present a fantastical vision of social (and zoological) life in the Victorian age.

The conceit of Charlotte's work is to take the often stiff and starchy portrait photographs of early nineteenth century men, women and children, but with their human heads and faces supplanted with photographed likenesses of creatures stuffed and preserved by courtesy of the Victorian taxidermist's art.

The results are, by turn, delightful, dotty and, every now and again, disturbing...

A fantastical new book – a kind of bizarre Victorian photograph album – crammed with several hundred of these these extraordinary images has just been issued by Black Dog Publishing at £19.95 under the title You Animal, You! accompanied by an insightful introduction by A N Wilson. The book reveals the diversity of life in the Charlotte's animal kingdom: animal-people at work – from the groves of academe, to the front-line of the Empire's battlefields – and at play – on the sportsfield, at the theatre, beside the seaside or travelling the world.

Here are few of these remarkable denizens...

 

MAD HOUSE FOR BIRD BRAINS

Wanting to attract nesting birds to your back yard?

What is less likely to encourage a flock of blue-tits in search of a 'des res' than this Wonderland bird-box...

But maybe it'd be OK if you're bird-spotting in or around the Tulgey Wood!

LET US PREY

At Tilmanstone Village Fête last weekend (where David was performing magic) we watched a display of birds of prey and managed to capture a few not-too-bad photographs. Here are a few of the owls, hawks and kestrels that were on show...

...and you can see the whole flock (together with some other avian portraits) in my flickr album, Birds of a Feather

Images: Brian Sibley and David Weeks, © 2010