birding-aus

Avian collective nouns - Part 3

To: "b-a" <>
Subject: Avian collective nouns - Part 3
From: "Syd Curtis" <>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 09:54:57 +1000
Hello again,

            Herewith a couple of lists of proposed nouns for Australian birds.  

Harvey Perkins says that a group of about 10 magpie-larks made him immediately think of a pow-wow of peewees.  Good one, if (as Harvey says), you know them as Peewees.  I do.  And Harvey also gives us these:

      A 'splatter' of Galahs (those ones you see dead beside the road!)
    A 'madrigal' of magpies
    A 'cacophony' of cockatoos
    A 'flirtation' of finches
    A 'dabble' of ducks
    A 'gaggle' of babblers

Anthea and Brian Fleming in Melbourne have come up with this list:

        an idiocy of emus
     a yodelling of magpies
     a merriment of kookaburras
     a gluttony of gannets
     an aviation of albatrosses
     a collection of bowerbirds
     a hoard of bowerbirds (note spelling; I did not say 'horde!')
     a mounding of megapodes
     a squawk of swamphens
     a clamber of parrots
     a screech of cockatoos
     a migraine of lorikeets
     a folly of galahs
     a startle of blackbirds (Melbourne's commonest bird deserves a mention)
     an impertinence of Willy Wagtails
     a scolding of scrubwrens
     a scurry of sittellas
     a cacophony of wattlebirds
     a hover of spinebills
     an invisibility of pardalotes
     a mattock of choughs (whitewinged of course)
     an unidentifiability of thornbills
     a hurtle of needletails
     an apparition of stone-curlews
     a scuttle of dotterels (I mean small plover)
     a peep of stints
     a slum of pigeons (feral of course)
     a scavenge of gulls
     a robbery of skuas
     a skim of shearwaters
     a patrol of jabiru (aka Blacknecked Stork - 'policeman bird' up north)
     an immobility of frogmouths
     a camouflage of frogmouths

At this stage, I'm going to give up in this unequal contest.  I will however post a Part 4 consisting of a quote of names obsolete and names current to which I alluded in Part 1.

With my computer problems, I may have lost some inward messages.  If there are some I should have quoted and haven't, I apologise.  

To go beyond Australian birds, is a task beyond me, and the resultant lists beyond the sensible limits on the size of b-a messages.  I would recommend, however, that anyone wishing to delve into collective nouns, in use or suggested, for extra-Australian birds, should contact Bob Forsyth in Mt Isa -  - who has ferreted out a tremendous amount of information from the Internet.

Syd



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