Colourful Language: Birds in an English Garden

About ths blog : Communicating in any language

Art and illustration and gardening, and two languages: English and French - is there a link other than these activities being of interest to me ?

This question has arisen with my decision to launch this blog with my thoughts on what I do. Certainly, these are the interests and skills that I have acquired as I've stumbled along, sometimes with very little idea of where I'm going but are they too disparate for a single blog, which needs focus ? Possibly, but maybe they are linked by more than serendipity ?

As I've found that studying a language, art and more recently gardening, have put me in touch with people with whom I might otherwise not have had any contact, I can't help wondering if the common denominator is less my interest than the communication these activities have generated.
Learning a language, understanding another culture, is definitely about communication but so too is art where of course the language is visual. Gardening also facilitates communication (say it with flowers ?) as does any activity that allows you to link with people, share and exchange ideas. Sport - I do that too - is another way of coming together, pooling efforts and enjoying shared experiences. So maybe the link is the committed, constructive and creative use of our time that allows us all as individuals to be part of something bigger than ourselves : a community ?

Moreover, gardening, like art and illustration, but also learning to communicate in another language, creates colour (literally and metaphorically) in our lives and makes people... smile. And isn't the best way to start a conversation with a smile ?

So, perhaps when explaining what I do, which sometimes I find difficult to do because I don't fit easily into any nice, neat category, I should say : "I'm a communicator".

Tuesday 3 March 2009

Birds in an English Garden

With winter drawing to a close, the first signs of spring are increasingly apparent in the garden: first the snowdrops, then crocuses and now the daffodils are coming into flower. The birds too are singing again. Hence this latest project for my blog: regular drawings/paintings of garden birds with commentaries.

This first illustration shows a blackbird in a mountain ash tree, which of course would be an autumn sighting. In the spring they are more often seen feeding on the ground: running along, they'll stop dead, tilt their head to one side, listen, then suddenly they'll pull up a worm.

One of the most common visitor to English gardens, especially in the spring when they have young to feed, the blackbird is easy to identify by sight and by its glorious song.

The Blackbird / Le Merle

The naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788) describes the blackbird thus:

Le mâle adulte dans cette espèce est encore plus noir que le corbeau, il est d'un noir plus décidé, plus pur, moins altéré par des reflets : excepté le bec, le tour des yeux, le talon et la plante du pied, qu'il a plus ou moins jaune, il est noir partout et dans tous les aspects ; aussi les Anglais l'appellent-ils l'oiseau noir par excellence.

The adult male is even blacker than the crow. It's a purer, more definite black that is affected less by the light. The bird is black all over except for beak, the ring around the eyes, the claw and the base of the foot, which are all yellow. It's for this reason that the English call this bird the blackbird.

The illustration is a drawing that I did on the computer using the Paint programme.

The extract from L'Histoire naturelle by Buffon is cited at: http://www.oiseaux.net/