#timor sparrow

[sitting-on-me-bum]

“Bramble Finch #1 (cock)” (2017)

In Luke Stephenson’s Bold Portraits of Show Birds, the Personality Is in the Plumage

Left: Canary #10 (Yorkshire yellow)” (2017). Right: “Blackbird #1 (cock)” (2019)

“European Robin #1” (2018)

Left: “Golden Song Sparrow #1 (cock)” (2018). Right: “Timor Sparrow #1” (2018)

[newscarsting]

this is the ugliest fucking thing ive seen

tippy

[littlesparklight]

Some general thoughts on the gods on Troy's side, and why they might be:

Aphrodite: Presumably out of affection for her son, Anchises, and Paris. Very potentially, wanting to assure the gift she's given Paris lasts as long as possible? But if this is a factor, hardly something she is beholden to in any way; it'd probably be more about her own pride in that case. But, given that she also helps protect Hektor's corpse, when he, at least, is no longer able to pay her back for such aid, her affection/aid to the Trojans aren't just for or because of those three.

Apollo: Thetis' warning/prophecy to her son that killing Tennes/a son of Apollo would mean Apollo would kill him (Plutarch, Quaest. Graec. 28, Bibliotethe, Epitome 3.26), then we have Achilles killing Troilus in his sancuary, which would be reason enough on its own but Troilus can also be Apollo's son. There's Apollo so ardently protecting Hektor throughout the war, even/maybe especially after his death (Hektor is also in several sources Apollo's son). Also his relationship with Hecuba and how in Stesichorus he rescues her. (Could also put Kassandra and Helenos here.)

Part of his defense of Troy might be about "fate" and when it's the "proper time" for Troy to fall, but Apollo's ties to Troy/individuals attached to Troy are more deep-set than that. He is the one to punish Neoptolemos' sacrilege of killing Priam at Zeus' altar. Apollo is also rarely present during vase art scenes around the Judgment, potentially connecting to; Apollo specifically being the one to aid Paris (or in some variants, using Paris' shape) to kill Achilles. Real-world wise, the possibility of connecting Apaliuna(s)/Appaluwa as Wilusa/Troy's patron god to Apollo.

Ares: Unstable ally. Hard to say how consistently he is on either side; Athena says he "only yesterday" on the first day of fighting in the Iliad was loudly pledging to Hera and Athena that he'd help the Achaeans.

Perhaps he's been aiding the Trojans more or less secretly/openly throughout the war, as much because he supports whatever side he wishes on a whim as that Aphrodite (and Apollo?) has asked him to. Either way, certainly not as consistent nor out of any particular affection or feeling of protectiveness for the Trojans.

Artemis: "For, in her pity, holy Artemis is angry at the winged hounds of her father, for they sacrifice a wretched timorous thing, together with her young, before she has brought them forth. An abomination to her is the eagles' feast." (Agamemnon, Aeschylus, line 135) ; this is about the eagles and hare omen, which replaces (or in addition to, as this seems to have happened in Mycenae) the snake and sparrows one. Artemis is put forth as unhappy with Troy's (future) fall/the war.

And, it's of course very easy to see the demand for Iphigenia in reparation for Agamemnon's hubris in a similar way, that if he/the army, wants to go off and kill/enslave innocents elsewhere, he/they has to start at home. She may also be helping her brother, and there is the Skamandrios, son of Strophios, who she herself taught to hunt in the Iliad. She has independent connections to Troy, and could be one of the more focused on Trojan deities along with her brother and their mother.

Leto: We have nothing, aside from the fact that she is on the Trojan side with her children in Book 21. But real-world-wise, there's also that Leto was an important goddess on the coast, and in Lycia connected to a Lycian mother goddess. So one could probably make inference for the in-universe reason being as much her siding with her children as that Troy is honouring her (maybe particularly so), along with the rest of the countries on the coast.

Xanthos: intimately woven together with Troy's royal family, as he's married a couple daughters into the line and his (only?) son's daughter married Dardanos.

Zeus: He's technically/actually neutral, a driving force to keep the war going as it "needs to". He's therefore on Troy's side more through the sentiment(s) he expresses or is assigned to him rather than in action.

Particularly so if one turns to the "he planned the war" variants - but these are never about Troy, or Paris, but rather about something much larger than any fault any individual Trojan or Troy has a whole as made themselves guilty of. [Though individual mortals in the Iliad, and in later sources, both tragedies and lyric, will imply that it's Zeus as god of xenia that ensures his working towards Troy's destruction, rather than any plan that has little to do with Troy.]

For his connections to and being for Troy, have Proclus' summary of the Kypria for example, where the plan mentioned at the end is to "relieve the Trojans" specifically, and that phrasing turns Achilles' anger and Zeus acting to fulfil his demands not about Achilles' honour, but about aiding Troy. In Pindar's Paean 6 (fragmentary), Zeus is said to "not dare to change fate [the destruction of Troy]", easily to implicate that he otherwise might, because he would wish to. More important, perhaps, is his statement that Troy is his most favoured city, and how Hera offers up three of her favoured cities for Zeus' one, how he wishes to save Hektor, and the description in the Iliad (by Poseidon) that Dardanos was the/one of the sons [by mortal women, though Elektra couldn't have been that] that he loves the most.

[snake-rattler]

if yuo were an estrildidae finch i think yuod be a timor sparrow

I had to go through my book to remember which one that was.

It somehow managed to enter my base.. I suppose i can respect it.

[very-grownup]

Although no signpost points the way there and even the track made by the shackled feet of its inhabitants in the course of the dolorous journey to the place is soon obscured by the rapid summer growth of mosses and small plants or erased by winter's snow so that no trace remains of their arrivals, we are in the vicinity of the settlement of R., near which, in the year, 18--, the Countess P., having successfully poisoned her husband over a period of years with an arsenical compound and got away with it, and finding herself, in her widowhood, much possessed by the idea that other women had committed the same crime as she with less success, set up, with the permission of the government, a private asylum for female criminals of the same stripe as herself.

Do not run away with the idea it was a sense of sisterhood that moved her. If, though the years passed, she herself never forgot the precise nature of the seasonings she'd added to her late husband's borsht and piroshkis, she assuaged the conscience that pricked her by becoming, or so she claimed, a kind of conduit for the means of the repentance of the other murderesses.

With the aid of a French criminologist who dabbled in phrenology, she selected from the prisons of the great Russian cities women who had been found guilty of killing their husbands and whose bumps indicated the possibility of salvation. She established a community on the most scientific lines available and had the female convicts build it for themselves out of the same kind of logic that persuaded the Mexican federales to have those they were about to shoot dig their own graves.

It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids and steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows. In that room she'd sit all day and stare and stare and stare at the murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared at her.

There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why a woman should want to murder her husband; homicide might be the only way for her to preserve a shred of dignity at a time, in a place, where women were deemed chattels, or, in the famous analogy of Tolstoy, like wine bottles that might conveniently be smashed when their contents were consumed. No reasonable female would hold it against their Countess P. that she poisoned her obese, oafish count, although the blend of boredom and avarice that prompted her to do so was in itself the product of privilege -- she suffered sufficient leisure to be bored; her husband's wealth provoked her greed. But, as for Olga Alexandrovna, who took a hatchet to the drunken carpenter who hit her around once too often, Olga Alexandrovna acted out of a conviction that His eye was on the sparrow and therefore on even such a weak, timorous and unworthy creature as herself, so that the life being beaten out of her was surely worth as much, in the general scheme of things, as the life of the man with the fists -- perhaps, since she was a loving mother, more. But it turned out the court thought otherwise than she and so, for a time, she suffered atrocious pangs to find the court believed she was a wicked woman.

'You're in luck,' the turnkey told the convicted woman after the French phrenologist measured her head and asked the court that she should be transferred to the Countess's 'scientific establishment for the study of female criminals'. Good luck, indeed! no hard labour, no flogging for Olga Alexandrovna, bound as she was for the Countess's seminary. And the turnkey laughed, raped her and chained her. Next day, she set out for Siberia.

During the hours of darkness, the cells were lit up like so many small theatres in which each actor sat by herself in the trap of her visibility in those cells shaped like servings of baba au rhum. The Countess, in the observatory, sat in a swiveling chair whose speed she could regulate at will. Round and round she went, sometimes at a great rate, sometimes slowly, raking with her ice-blue eyes -- she was of Prussian extraction -- the tier of unfortunate women surrounding her. She varied her speeds so that the inmates were never able to guess beforehand at just what moment they would come under her surveillance.

As for the inmates, indeed they toiled not, neither did they spin, just as Olga Alexandrovna's turnkey had foretold. Not even the lash disturbed the even tenor of their days. They were fed morning and evening; the food, black bread, millet porridge, broth, was delivered through a grille and it was certainly as good, if not better than Olga Alexandrovna was accustomed to. A bucket of water arrived in the mornings, when the previous day's toilet-pail was taken away and a fresh one delivered. The bedding was changed once a month. No mail was permitted and the isolation of the place itself, far off in the taiga, would alone have precluded the possibility of visitors, even if they had not been strictly forbidden.

By the standards of the time and place, the Countess conducted her regime along humanitarian, if autocratic lines. Her private prison with its unorthodox selectivity was not primarily intended as the domain of punishment but, in the purest sense, a penitentiary -- it was a machine designed to promote penitence.

For the Countess P. had conceived the idea of a therapy of meditation. The women in the bare cells, in which was neither privacy nor distraction, cells formulated on the principle of those in a nunnery where all was visible to the eye of God, would live alone with the memory of their crime until they acknowledged, not their guilt -- most of them had done that, already -- but their responsibility. And she was sure that with responsibility would come remorse.

Then she would let them go for, by their salvation, strenuously achieved through meditation on the crime they had committed, they would have procured hers.

But, so far, the gate had never opened to allow one single departure.

You could think of this wheel-shaped House of Correction as a kind of prayer-wheel, intended to rescue the Countess who was its hub from perdition, although the only thing in it which rotated like a wheel was herself, on her revolving chair.

Olga Alexandrovna was no great reader, although, unlike many of her neighbours, she knew her letters well enough, hard and pointless as the task of learning them had seemed when imposed on her in her childhood. All the same, she'd have liked the scriptures with her, to help her out in some of the ethical discussions she conducted with herself, but books were forbidden because they helped time pass.

So she sat and pondered, inside the House of Correction in which there was no hint of the wide world outside, for there were no windows to let in daylight, ventilation being provided by a system of ducts. Above the arched gateway that let in a glimpse of daylight only when it opened to admit another inmate, there was a clock that told the Moscow time that was not the time of these latitudes and this clock regulated their risings, their feedings, registered every slow minute of incarceration and sometimes the face of this clock seemed indistinguishable from the livid face of the Countess.

The Countess intended to look at them until they repented. But sometimes the women died, it would seem for no reason, or as if life, in that perverse honeycomb, was such a faint and faded thing that anything would be an improvement. When one died, a guard humped the corpse out of the cell and buried it under the paving stones of the circular passage in which they took their morning exercise. Even death was no escape from the House of Correction. As soon as a cell was empty, another murderess was delivered up to the gate which closed upon her with a definitive clang.

So the ordeal of penitence began; an ordeal constructed from a perfected variety of the bitterest loneliness, for you were never alone, here, where her gaze was continually upon you, and yet you were always alone.

But, so far, although the Countess lived in hope, not a single one of the objects of her gaze had shown the slightest quiver of remorse.

By the end of the third year of her incarceration, Olga Alexandrovna would never have said she was innocent; she'd always admitted her crime freely. But every day she offered extenuating circumstances to the lenient and merciful judge in her mind and every day they made more and more impression on the judge. Each night, before she stretched out on her straw mattress and slept, he brought in another verdict of self-defence, so that Olga Alexandrovna was more and more startled to wake up again in her cold cell to discover the eyes of the Countess raking over her as if they were raking over the ashes of the crime, always finding there more significance than mere manslaughter. Then the devil's advocate in Olga Alexandrovna's mind found it necessary to order a retrial and she had to start all over again. So her days passed.

- Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter

[stocklivemarket]

This charming and notoriously slow coastal city is a city that has suddenly found itself as the leading national capital after East Timor became an independent country in May 2002. Located on the northern coast of East Timor along the narrow plains between Timor and the mountain range that runs through the Ombai Strait, Dili is also the capital of the region of the same name. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMdEhU7WKOQ[/embed] Dili, a remote colonial city in a remote part of the world in colonial times, has now become the bearer of its rich heritage. With a pronounced Portuguese influence, Macau is probably the furthest eastern city where you can experience the most authentic Portuguese food and architecture. In the city, where a lot of violence took place during the referendum period after 1999, Dili, which had gone through a bad period when many buildings were burned and many infrastructures were destroyed, however, recovered in an extraordinary way. The south side of Dili, which is quite small, is surrounded by the Palacio Governo, the State Palace and impressive Government Buildings, and is referred to as the heart of the city. To the east, the commercial district of Lecidere was conceived as part of Portugal, to the west it is surrounded by Colmera and the old Central Market. Head west along the coastal road (Ave de Portugal) and you can follow the Portuguese Farol houses, several embassies and restaurant districts. To the east of the Comoro Road, which is quite touristic, is the region also called Metiaut. This place is famous for its seaside restaurants. Trip To Dili Cristo Rei: Standing on a ledge in the east of Dili, Cristo Rei, also known as the Statue of Christ, is one of the must-see places. Legend has it that the structure, built by mostly Muslim Indonesians as a gift to the mostly Christian East Timorese, was designed for Jesus to return to Jakarta. The statue is about 27 meters high and stands on a globe. Following the steps to the statue of Christ along the beach of Dili, the path passes through various niches representing popular and cross stations where international and local fishermen also gather to exercise. The view of the statue in Dili Bay is magnificent. Fatucama Beach, in the form of the letter C, just behind the statue, is fascinating with its clear sea. Museum of the Resistance: Located within the borders of Rua University, just near the center of Dili, this museum is the right address for those who are curious about what happened during East Timor's 25-year struggle for independence. Brave War Memorial: The monument, which is 10 kilometers away from the mountains along the main line of the south road, leans its back on a magnificent view. Next to this memorial to the Australian Sparrow Force, which fought the Japanese for several years in Timor, there is also a permanent exhibit on Timor's war experience. This part, where the visit is free, also hosts a cafe with a very wide view. Beaches: There are many beaches in Dili. Among these, Areia Branca, right next to Cristo Rei, is one of the cleanest and most popular. Since there are many bars and restaurants along this beach, this is a very lively area not only during the day but also at night. The Jesus Backside beach, which is also within walking distance of Cristo Rei, has an insatiable view lying at the foot of the mountain. Outdoor Sports: Dili is a unique opportunity for outdoor sports enthusiasts. Diving is available in the area between Dili and Aturo Islands. In addition, tours are organized to the Jaco Islands for those who desire a more distant route, and diving is offered in this region. Another popular activity in the area is hiking and climbing. Mountaineers from all over the world come to Mount Ramalau. It is the highest mountain in East Timor. Even if you are not a professional climber, you have the opportunity to climb the mountain, which can be freezing at night. Because many tour companies provide services in this regard.

[hiatus-butterscotch-loft]

Here some more perfections and mentioning some finches and pigeons/doves

Timor sparrow [Lonchura fuscata]

Blood Pheasant [Ithaginis cruentus]

silver-tipped imperial pigeon [Ducula luctuosa]

Pink-headed fruit dove [Ptilinopus porphyreus]

Cinnamon ground dove [Gallicolumba rufigula]

Evening grosbeak [Hesperiphona vespertina]

Japanese bull finch [Pyrrhula pyrrhula griseiventris]

Desert finch [Rhodospiza obsoleta]

lahore pigeons are some of the most visually appealing birds out there. like in terms of visual design. very minimalist, good contrast.

[poetyca]

Offerta – Offer

Offerta

Due passerotti sul ramo;si osservano, si cercano.Inevitabile che ogni tanto debbano spiccare il volo,la loro natura è quella; eppure ad ali spiegate nell’azzurrità del cielo, nell’apparente essere lontani;da quel ramo, dalla visione dell’altro passero,non ci si è mai allontanati, le foglie, i luoghi e l’albero;il senso di dolce compagnia vissuta con il compagno sono per sempre nella memoria e nel cuore.Basta semplicemente essere consapevoli di questo.Raccogliere questa capacità di evocazione, porre la fragile forza di essere oltre distanze ed apparenze dinnanzi a noi, per sapere che tutto è un lampo;solo noi possiamo decidere se è timore o luce che squarcia il buio; come colmare le attese se di rimpianto o di quella gioia per la gratitudine di ogni attimo vissuto : la sua ricchezza ed offerta d’amore.

19.09.2006 Poetyca Offer Two sparrows on the branch, are observed, are sought. Inevitable that sometimes must fly, their nature is, and yet to spread wings the blue sky, being away in apparent; from that branch, from viewing the sparrow there has never been removed, the leaves, place and the tree; the sense of sweet company lived with her boyfriend are forever in his mind and heart. Just be aware of this. Ability to meet this evocation, put the strength to be weak over distances and appearances before us, to know that everything has a flash; only we can decide whether it is fear or light that pierces the dark as to fill the expectations if of regret or gratitude for the joy every moment lived, its wealth and offer love. 19.09.2006 Poetyca

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[thebeautycove]

JOVOY PARIS - PAVILLON ROUGE - Eau de Parfum -

Cuir corsaire. Hoist your scarlet red Jolly Roger. The adventure to conquer freedom has just begun. Living is an exhilarating challenge. And it smells of glory and legend.

•••••

CUIRS | CAPITOLO IV

Di cuoio corsaro, vascelli fantasma e carichi preziosi in transito sulla via per le Indie. Di prede e tesori conquistati issando il Jolly Roger scarlatto, vessillo dei pirati di rango dai simboli macabri e fatali. Di mirabolanti avventure, tra mistero, suggestione e ammirazione, in cui gli ardimentosi protagonisti delle scorribande marinare corrono e vincono il mare. Loro sanno quanto la vita li sfidi e quanto la sfida sia vita, impregnata di odori di gloria e leggenda.

E se la fragranza ti prende e riporta lì, quale energia arcana, è la conquista ultima dei sensi. Lo fa senza timore Pavillon Rouge di JOVOY PARIS, creazione pronta a saccheggiare i sensi, ti appiccichi a lei per ritrovarti nelle stive segrete del Jolly Roger di Capitan Uncino in rotta verso l’IsolaCheNonC’è, tra le fantastiche pagine d’esotica evasione di Emilio Salgari che di sicuro l’avrebbe fatta indossare al suo Corsaro Nero per solcare, a bordo della Folgore, le tumultuose acque caraibiche della Tortuga. E certo anche il bizzarro astuto Jack Sparrow ne avrebbe abusato accompagnandola ad un robusto bicchiere di rum e polvere da sparo.

Che fragranza meravigliosa ha composto Marie Schnirer, audace, profonda, satura di emozioni e fantasie, immaginifica nelle molteplici nuance che sviluppa dall’avvio al fondo. Un ricercato infuso ad alto tasso alcolico con rum, whisky torbato e spezie scure per salpare, cui fa eco il valoroso accordo cuoio, tabacco, tea Lapsang Souchong di pregevole armonia, dominante eppure morbido e accogliente, come tesoro da centellinare, appena estratto dal forziere degli aromi, un invito olfattivo ad osare e godere intensamente di ogni attimo. Infine la dolcezza, che mai deve mancare nel lieto fine, sentori ambrati, caldi rotondi languidi di legni e benzoino, accesi e sospesi nella cangiante bruma della vaniglia che tutto lusinga e ammanta di delizia.  Lasciatevi soggiogare. Lentamente e a lungo. Creata da Marie Schnirer Eau de Parfum 100 ml. In profumerie selezionate e online

©thebeautycove

[rogergreenawalt]

The island of Timor has been populated for up to 40,000 years, occupied by successive waves of immigrants from southern India, Malaysia and Melanesia. It was ruled by small kingdoms that traded spices, slaves and sandalwood with their neighbours. Portugal established a settlement on the eastern part of the island in 1633. Timor was formally divided between the Netherlands and Portugal in 1661, and the first governor of Portuguese Timor was appointed in 1701. For most of the next three centuries, East Timor was a Portuguese colony. During the Second World War, East Timor was occupied by Australian and Dutch forces,[3] and then invaded by the Japanese on 19 February 1942. Sparrow Force, the Australian commandos and Dutch troops on the island, waged a guerrilla campaign until the Australian and Dutch forces were withdrawn in January 1943.[5] The assistance of the East Timorese people in helping the Australians created a bond between Australia and East Timor that became part of popular mythology in Australia. After the war ended, Timor was occupied by Australia,[7] which supported Indonesian independence from the Netherlands,[8] and proposed that East Timor become a United Nations (UN) trusteeship, but backed down in the face of objections from the United Kingdom. (at Pasadena, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJTqm0Ih9s2/?igshid=hdecvf0o24n3

[quickfitfoxx]

Day 30 Review

Yay! A month of logging 😊 Things are getting pretty real at work and i am feeling so challenged. I just need to remember - i am smart! I learn quickly! I can hold my own, and i can do this. I'm here for a reason and every single day I'm going to work harder to get better. Anyway... today i ate like a sparrow at work and then picked up a veggie pizza on the way home heheheh. No ragrets, i ate half today and will eat the other half tomorrow for lunch (just under 400 cal a half). Tomorrow will be a huge day. Im flying in a f***ing cessna to a remote island in the timor sea to do an enviro survey. But its ok! Get outta here imposter syndrome! I am a boss! Intake: 1500 cal in/2200 out, 700 deficit.

[onkar]

Poem: First Monsoon

By: Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Immigrant pregnant clouds in this high time Preparing to deliver aerial showers, Huge watery vessels, like a developed baby Too heavy to hold in atmospheric womb; With lightening proclaiming over the vastness Of the supply of life fluids, Weary peasants restless eyes wait for Their intimate Dark Relatives, Timorous honeybees, humble sparrows at bowers, Come; welcome the…

[libidomechanica]

That turneth alwey a coltes tooth

Cries and health will last as  specie can, upon them burn so  charge you, O daughter Briar Rose and 

drownd with my gossib, dwellynge  in her deep relation I think)  to trusted God began  to open to my gossyb  dame Alys, and bristles from  the sea. A thirds all pillow 

glowed an oxymoron or absolute  autocrat not a budding  more, and fell, from April on  to where hung a silver.  And in the iron hour 

with timorous through  her broad, made stocking dreams, ready to 

his please to be,  then might appal! The dart is  set on one would see thought and 

loss without were this, authorizing  thy Face from world were  near— close ourselves about  the most importune, until  he for all mens is that  suit the far-off was  here, it crossing these, as through our  hospitality. With  his arrows are 

still the roof, and sharpend  earth, and the pure immortal  rage; when something is doubly  sweet; and then set a value  on, (as being into  withstand? Trusty to another  works are less foul which Venus  most sweet. Vsen we freely, as  with honest doubt, for  all we fle. And moan the touch  thy balmy breast. and madness, the  gardens, all pallid aspect which 

is but a little sparrows blue  veins to sweep Is it that 

evere folke now no further back, Of  wire. a music all that  the argument all bare is  now in his thankful sighs O 

for the heart! The 

universe. I blesse! Up stirte the  pure air, that with books and  the velvet patches  guilt and Ive called him thro the  mothers. As I all other eye  dilated my ideal, for to  stray, sceptred terror, lest I stifly  myne olde kaynard, is this similes  are as a flock of  beauty indirectly  on youth Diadem, and, proud 

with the dark veins, which  he doth restlessness; and yet in  bacon hadde he forsook hire  eke. almost dies not, reaps a truth as  if the mind? We are  warm hands are ours, we  know no more of reproach shall knowledge  is of monarchs with  beauty veild, to what 

could not feel it to be?  And mankind, like Pyrrho, on a  sudden blow, but mines the Sunne:  First fruits; camphire, what all, and sadness  short; and our days? and  by the misty river-tide.

[marvellouslymade]

On bigger birds

Recently I blogged about the sad dearth of small birds in my garden. Today, as always, I went out early armed with a plethora of food to tempt them: suet treats, sunflower hearts and even dried mealworms, the aroma of which is grim but which, from the rapidity with which they vanish, are much loved by our avian visitors.

 A few moments later, stood at the sink, I scanned the garden in hope of spying one of the small birds I was hoping to attract (and which seem to be in every increasing numbers is everyone else’s garden, unless friends only choose to tell me out of a distorted sense of humour).

 Nothing. Not a thing, even our regular robin. I sighed.

 But birds…well yes. Three feral pigeons pecked furiously around the base of the bird feeder – clearly news of the occasional sparrow hawk has not reached them. A family of four starlings dipped in and out of the bird table (designed to be too small for them, they hadn’t read that part of the description, clearly), with the miniscule amount of February light catching their vibrant and often under-appreciated plumage. Two collared doves were cooing quietly whilst awaiting their turn, because the parakeets had just flown in, a splash of bright green, announcing their arrival with characteristic noise to hang precariously but acrobatically from the feeder. A blackbird was skulking timorously amid some shrubbery.

 And so I watched, and as I did so was reminded how easy it is to concentrate on what we don’t have, rather than what we do. In some circumstances, of course, there is so little good that this is nigh on impossible. There are times for grieving, or other dark times when we need companions who will hold on to hope for us without false gaiety.  But for most of us, much of the time, there is something. The days are grey, but we have eyes to see them.

 I am not always very good at that kind of gratitude, and the birds can teach me here. Most birds drink by gravity, and so they will sip and then turn their beaks up, as if in a gesture of gratitude to the God who made them. The exception, as it happens, are doves and pigeons, who drink by suction so appear to lack the same thankfulness, but there again I have always had a certain amount of empathy for the often maligned pigeon in its very ordinayness so I can’t find it in my heart to chastise them.

 So, as this long grey winter slowly transforms into Spring, I will try to see what is there, rather than what is not. Perhaps some surprises may even be there waiting….

[writers-live-twice]

Dumpu, New Guinea, 7 October 1943. Members of the 2/2nd Australian Independent Company on their return to camp after a twelve-day patrol in the Ramu Valley, Left to right: NX37195 TROOPER (TPR) F. J. THORPE; WX11366 CORPORAL J. F. FOWLER; NX130254 TPR J. A. PRIOR; WX13118 TPR W. R. WATSON. The 2/2nd Commando Squadron was one of 12 independent companies or commando squadrons raised by the Australian Army for service during World War II. The 2/2nd served in Timor, New Guinea and New Britain during World War II, taking part in the Battle of Timor in June 1942 as part of Sparrow Force. Following the capture of the island, the company was withdrawn in December 1942 and returned to Australia, later taking part in operations in New Guinea in 1943–44 and then on New Britain in 1945. After the war, some of the unit's members became advocates for the rights of the Timorese people, recognizing the contribution that they had made to Australia's war effort. One member, John Patrick "Paddy" Kenneally, who died in March 2009 at the age of 93, said that the Australians would "...not have lasted a week had the Timorese not protected them". Kenneally visited East Timor four times after World War II; once in 1990 and a further three times after independence from Indonesia was achieved in 1999. In 2005, he appeared in TV advertisements promoting a fair deal for the people of East Timor in negotiations over Timor Sea gas and oil and was instrumental in securing a fair share of the gas field for the Timorese people.

[birdstudies]

January 17, 2016 - Timor Sparrow, Timor Dusky Sparrow, Timor Munia, Timor Finch, Kupang Sparrow, Kupang Munia, Brown Ricebird, or Brown Padda (Lonchura fuscata)

Found on the islands of Timor-Leste, Semau, and Roti in Southeast Asia, these finches are closely related to the similar looking Java Sparrow. Their diet consists mostly of grass and weed seeds, which they pick from the ground or sometimes directly from seedheads. Often foraging alone or in small groups, they may also join larger flocks of up to 50 birds with other grain-eating species. They are classified as Near Threatened due to habitat loss and possibly capture for the cage-bird trade.