Lake Carnegie Eagle On Way to Convocation — by Brenda Jones

An underutilized book in my much-reduced (because of  November’s move) library is The Birder’s Dictionary. I quail before (pun intended) species names and bird calls, let alone definitions of tertiaries and lores.  But I bought this book with every good intention to become a better birder.

Right on its cover, in ghostly letters, is that startling use of the word ‘bird’ as verb, meaning actively to go in search of birds, although they write simply, “to see”.

This is misleading, since one can bird for a very long time without actually seeing a bird - especially down at ‘the Brig’, South Jersey’s Edwin B. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge, if birders are birding at the wrong tide for their quarry.

Emptiness at ‘The Brig’     cfe

I picked this slim dictionary up at work recently, to read with my rather simplified lunch.  To my delight, on page 56, they print the poetic, quasi-archaic, seemingly very British list of group names for flocks of birds.

For all the bird books I have ‘devoured’, some of these terms startle and most of them delight.  May they do the same for you:

a bouquet of pheasants

a building of rooks

a cast of hawks

a charm of finches

a chattering of starlings

a congregation of plovers

a convocation of eagles

covey of quail or partridges    (this one I seem always to have known)

a deceit of lapwings

the descent of woodpeckers

the dissimulation of birds

a dule of doves

an exaltation of larks    (this one has always exalted me)

fall of woodcocks

flight of swallows (rather odd, as swallows also walk and especially perch, on wires)

gaggle of geese  (long known)

a host of sparrows

a murder of crows  (perhaps my favorite…)

mumuration of starlings

mustering of storks

an ostentation of peacocks (especially in full breeding plumage, especially at Grounds for Sculpture)

paddling of ducks   (well, what else, but why not dabbling?)

a parliament of owls  (O! can’t you see them, bewigged judges in the trees?)

a peep of chickens

a pitying of turtledoves

a rafter of turkeys

a siege of herons   (a bit hard on herons, aren’t they?)

a spring of teal

a tidings of magpies

an unkindness of raven   (influenced by Poe?)

a walk of snipe

a watch of nightingales

I should add that the place to find “a convocation of eagles” is not at the Brig, but in Salem and Cumberland Counties, especially in winter.  It may well entail being outdoors at 20 degrees in 20 mile-an-hour winds.  And the habits of eagles necessitate birders’ waiting for them until 10 or 10:30 a.m. — because eagles need thermals to rise from the warming ground, lift them to the skies, to their fishing grounds, and back and forth to their nets.

Eagle Carrying Nesting Material    Brenda Jones

I long to know who made up these quaint terms, who agreed, and whether ornithological unions update and/or tamper with these phrases, as they do with birds’ fine names.  (Let’s not even get STARTED on Baltimore Orioles!)

Oil on Hand and Fiddler Crab, Pass a Loutre, LA — “Out, out, damned spot…”

I suggest you think awhile on terms of clusters of birds.  Think what is happening in the Gulf, which no president of company or country, no general, not even a shaman seems to know how to counter.

Oil Passes Booms Into Marshalands, LA - Greenpeace Photograph

Consider that we humans, with our slash-and-burn lives, our felling of rainforests, our despoiling of oceans and wetlands, could wipe out any need for names for groups of birds.  Especially, right now, of cormorants.

Cormorant in Happier Times, in New Jersey waters, by Brenda Jones

We are deserving of the most dire of the group names: an unkindness of humans, a murder of humans, as bird health and numbers decline before our very helpless eyes.

Our Brother, the Pelican

I propose a new category - “A Desolation of Pelicans”

(from Star Ledger)

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From dear friend, Tari Pantaleo, President of Kingston Greenways Association: newfangled phrases