birds birds birds

we are back home now from our lovely holiday and i absolutely resent the fact that buildings everywhere are not fashioned out of Bath Stone and Georgian in style. i shouldn't complain, because i do happen to live in a very picturesque little town that i am always happy to return to, AND YET...

*i mean, just look at this!!! people actually live here???*

the birding craze is still in full swing. we managed to log lots of interesting species while in Bath, including a kingfisher and a eurasian jay. i'm currently debating whether or not to claim the jay as my favourite british crow. there's just something so thrilling about that flash of blue on its wing and i like that they're slightly more elusive than their cousins (playing hard to get works on me, apparently, if you are a bird).

*we spotted our first kingfisher at Prior Park, which boasts one of the only four Palladian Bridges in the world.*

thanks to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, Carel Fabritius's 1654 painting of the same name has received renewed interest over the last decade. but i want us now to turn our attentions to this terrific detail from Hieronymus Bosch's magnum opus, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that i found under the heading, "Depictions in art" on the Wikipedia page for the european goldfinch:

*i have never before seen a pleasant and agreeable-looking creature in all my life?*

upon first seeing it, i caught myself thinking, "there's so much going on here!" and then i remembered it was merely a detail. in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

anyway, if you have ~15 minutes to spare and are up for a challenge, i highly recommend poring over the full triptych and trying to identify as many birds as you can. the linked high resolution file is slightly too unwieldy for my ancient laptop to freely zoom in and out of for long without my browser inevitably crashing, but i spotted quite a few relatively easily-recognizable ones, including my beloved eurasian jay:

alright, well, that's enough bird talk from me now (and believe me when i say i could've gone on twice as long). ttyllll