Thursday, May 15, 2008

bonjour oiseaux deux: a birdy souvenir

As a bonus blog, I wanted to share one of the souvenirs I got in Paris.

The Famous.. Garden Birds playing cards! I haven't used them yet, but they are pretty cute. Each card has a different bird on it.



Here are some more of the birds I saw that I didn't mention in my last post: Merle noir, Troglodyte mignon, Geai des chênes, Pie bavarde, Héron cendré, Pic vert. OK, well, I don't know French but I recognized some of those words! The Merle noir is a European Blackbird. I had to double-check but noir means black so that one is pretty easy. The Troglodyte mignon is obviously a wren, and it turns out there is only one type of wren in my european field guide, and it is called.. a wren. I think I'll call it a European Wren. I recognized the word troglodyte, since it is the family (Troglodytidae) and genus name (Troglodytes) for all wrens. It turns out that troglodyte is also some sort of term in France for a weird cave that people dine in?? We had lunch in one of these caves/makeshift restaurants alongside some French roadside, but perhaps that's a whole different story.. However it raises an interesting question, are wrens associated with caves? I wouldn't have known.

Anyway, the other birds are a European Jay, a European Magpie, a Grey Heron and a Green Woodpecker. I liked the French word for Green Woodpecker since pic is likely related to the Latin "Picidae," which is the family name of a group of woodpeckers and vert is similar to verde, the Spanish word for green. OK, I guess it may be time to learn some more Latin to improve my worldly knowledge of birds...

One last European bird for this blog... you might recognize it from the previous entry.

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