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
|
|
