"Fast Food". Female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on a city street prepares to feast on a discarded french fry. (Credit: hedera.baltica / CC BY-SA 2.0) HEDERA.BALTICA VIA A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

What I like about this photo is that when I was a kid, I was amazed when I saw a sparrow doing this very thing, scavenging french fries. I was around 7–8 years old. My mom had taken me on a shopping trip in her 1968 Buick Skylark, green with black roof. We stopped at McDonald's for a snack. She went in to get food and left me sitting in the car. She had parked in front of the shop, facing the hedge-bordered outdoor eating area. I saw sparrows hopping through those hedges and on the ground around them. A lucky few of them found several french fries and were either eating them or carrying them away in their beaks. As a little kid growing up in a rural area, I expected birds to eat only seeds or bugs, so this sparrow french fry feast was surprising and hilarious to me.>

Connecting back to a previous research point

Bird's eye view-- spanning historically

Discusses the bird's eye view

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdlime

something poetic about these examples even if they're poor science...

https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds

Lynne Kelly mentioned that there might be some interesting research on birds and memory with respect to songlines-like activity.

hmmm....the only white birds...as if too say the only pure ones??? pure as in what?

bird can symbolize freedom or captivity in a poem. Because he mentions too, the bird's wings as a separate entity. There is a distinctive image or flight, liberation, freedom.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html

Linking to a New York Times tag archive would not be considered evidence by any self-respecting conspiracy theorist.

An uncommon verbing of iTunes as well as Angry Birds.

I was at the bookstore yesterday and ran into two new useful resources that looked interesting in this space.

Specific to birdsong, there was

200 Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsky (Becker & Mayer, 2020, ISBN: ‎ 978-0760368831)

Read about and listen to birds from six continents. A beautiful painting illustrates each selection along with concise details about the bird's behavior, environment, and vocalizations. On the built-in digital audio player, hear each bird as it sings or calls in nature with audio of the birds provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

This could be useful in using the book itself as a memory palace in addition to the fact that the bird calls are built directly into the book for immediate playback while reading/memorizing. There are a few other related books with built in sound in this series as well.

The other broader idea was that of

"A bird a day"

I saw the book A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens (Batsford, 2021, ISBN: 978-1849945868) to help guide one towards learning about (or in our context maybe memorizing) a bird a day. It had names, photos, and other useful information which one might use to structure a palace to work at in small chunks. I know there are also many other related calendars which might also help one do something like this to build up a daily practice of memorizing data into a palace/journey/songline.

The broader "Thing-a-day" calendar category might also be useful for other topics one might want to memorize as well as to have a structure set up for encouraging spaced repetition.

@doughoff Thanks for kicking this off. I'm relieved to see someone else occupied (personally I'm worried) with this topic.

I've recently begun some work on memorizing birds in North America. Bird song is one of the more intimidating areas for me as I have absolutely zero knowledge of music beyond a pair of functioning ears.

In my early searches for a comprehensive text to work from, I did note that the book Birds of North America (Golden Field Guides series) by Chandler S. Robbins, & Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim (St. Martin's Press, 2001) was one of the few guides that dealt with birdsong and had a short section on the subject in the front and listed visual sonograms for most birds. Sadly, the book didn't include audio which I think may have been incredibly helpful in matching the sound with the visuals.

I have bookmarked a few websites that deal with it, though there are sure to be many others that match birdsong audio to a visual representation of some sort. Here are a few of those:

• http://earbirding.com/blog/archives/category/spectrograms
• https://www.audubon.org/news/start-using-spectrograms-read-bird-songs-and-calls
• http://donaldkroodsma.com/?page_id=49

Initially I imagined that through direct experience in listening and viewing these sonograms, I might come to some sort of facility with them. Next I would potentially rely on the concept of pareidolia to come up with some images to attach to them.

In any case, I thought I'd sketch out my general plan and some of the resources and words I'd come across to see if they may be of help to others. I'm looking forward to seeing what others may have come up with or used as well. Birdsong will assuredly be the last piece of the puzzle that I build into my bird repertoire.

Incidentally, after having done some significant library searching and bird guide/handbook review, I've chosen Birds of North America, Francois Vuilleumier (Dorling Kindersley, 2020, ISBN:978-0-7440-2053-3) as my "bible" for it's structuring of bird families, photographs, descriptions, and variety of data about birds and their ranges. It's about as comprehensive (for my area of the world) as anything out there, is well laid out, and sort of makes its own method of loci based on page layouts and color schemes. It is too large to take out into the field easily, but I find that working on storing the data is easier in the comfort of the house than the wilderness.

I'll also note that it has representative visual flight diagrams which may be relatively easy to categorize and therefore memorize bird flight patterns. If others have better or more detailed resources for this, I'd love to know those as well.

Account started on 2021-05-12 at 11:37 PM

Bizarre...

Birds of Prey: Black Mask's Suit is Trending Everywhere

Bringing characters on to the big screen, DC Comics has been a step ahead of Marvel Comics, it's longtime rival, in terms of giving cinematic life to its underrated super villains like Roman Sionis Black Mask.

Featured in Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, Black Mask is a crime lord who rules over the underground world of the city of Gotham. Kind of a maniac who loves taking delight in torturing the innocents, Roman is one of the ugliest men to live in Batman's city.

As the story goes on and Black Mask is featured in Birds of Prey, you can rush to the nearby cinema to watch the DC Comics' latest film based on the supervillain character of Harley Quinn while knowing more about one of the biggest criminal-minded figures to exist in Gotham.

Although Birds of Prey has already been watched by thousands of DC Comics fans, many have taken it to social media and other online forums to admire the wardrobes of each and every character featured in the film.

While Harley Quinn's multi-colored wardrobe has already received millions of likes on social media, Black Mask's corporate slave like an outfit is also earning a considerable number of likes and comments for the masterminds behind it.

A mind blogging attire featuring a unique pattern, the so-called Black Mask Birds of Prey Suit is a wardrobe better than many of the rivals of the supervillain. Specifically, when you compare it with the formal wardrobe given to Batman or Superman, you tend to find a great difference allowing the former to look better than the latter.

The difference is so striking that, regardless of the nature of the character, you might prefer Roman's suit with your eyes closed. Ironically, despite the fact, Roman is an ugly creature with no beautiful face to show the world, his style, and manly attitude while meeting his counterparts or rivals put him on top of the list of the worth-following characters in the world of DC Comics.

You check out every other wardrobe rocked by the supervillain and you will find an immense level of creativity dominating his clothing style. This absolutely indicates, the bad guy cares about his physical features and tries his level best to get rid of the ugliness showered to him by an accident during his birth. Every other outfit of Black Mask is surely the result of the inferiority complex surrounding the supervillain from the very first day and often making him think like a useless creature with nobody to love him which makes him put on the luxurious wear to overcome the destructive thought patterns while allowing him to deal with the unworthy phenomenon of inferiority.

Although it should be very clear, ever since the wealthy character Roman has been featured in Harley Quinn's solo film, the number of his fans has jumped from thousands to millions with most of them are among the die-hard fans of his passion for fashion.

The very well developed, finely designed and greatly stitched black suit sported by Black Mask is a great piece to be considered for formal parties and get together events with the formal clothing theme. Regardless of who the suit has been inspired from, you could choose to try it for a fascinating yet hot appearance while hoping to be admired by the self-proclaimed fashion gurus in your friend list. If there is anything worthy that Roman's character has given to his fans and that could be added to an apparel collection as something special reminding of him then it's his sizzling hot suit with perfection dominating it from bottom to the top.

Parrots!

These sort of renders have a lot to answer for.

The problems of modern urbanism. Urbanism for birds.

I have never seen a picture with Winston Churchill and parrots. It raises him higher in my esteem. I bet they swore also.

Seems like Jackson had the last laugh!

This should be the story that everyone knows!

This is so cool! (Until they take over the world, that is...)

What the heck?

Wow, incredible!!

Great metaphor. My tutoring center would love this quote