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down came a blackbird
Wednesday, 3 August 2011 11:51 amGoshdarnit, it would have to be the morning I arrive at work late (owing to a detour to allow medical vampires to extract their weekly quotient of blood) that a helicopter crashes on middle campus. I saw all the police vehicles milling about and deploying flashing lights as I drove up the hill, and vaguely wondered what the hell was going on. (My amorphous sort of thought was "government bigwig giving lecture", which says somethingorother about something, not sure what). Pics here. Not a hugely serious crash, no-one dead, pilot injured, but those are some extremely expensive-looking helicopter bits lying all over the road. Also, I am unrepentant about my basely but typically human desire to have seen the crash. It would have been some innocent excitement to my day.
Talking about black airborne things and disasters, I am also apparently under siege by starlings in my office. There's a large starling population on campus, and they make a good living off rubbish bins, litter and occasional sandwiches straight out of the hands of unsuspecting students. They also occupy the buildings with careless insouciance, leaving bird crap all over halls and lecture theatres, and betraying a thoroughly fiendish and unavian intelligence in their ability not to hurtle into closed windows, but to flip derisively through appropriate gaps. Possibly a junk food diet has caused unnatural mutations. Also, Hitchcock. She says darkly.
I left my window open while I was in a meeting yesterday, and a pair of starlings clearly flew into the office while I was out and had a good old explore, leaving bird crap all over student forms, important documents, my offical faculty stamp, and a random selection of Sookie Stackhouse novels I was lending to a student. (MA thesis on vampires and immortality). Miffed, I closed the window to leave only a tiny crack open, upon which the two culprits immediately spent the rest of the day sitting outside and craning in through the crack to look at me reproachfully, whistling rude things to each other about my lack of compassion. Honestly, they're more like cats than birds: that absolutely narcissistic self-will, and desperate need to be in a space simply because they're being excluded from it. (cf Hobbit outside the bathroom door). Starlings always remind me of Todal.
This is not a good photo, they move around a lot. Either that or they have stealth technology which blurs them.
Talking about black airborne things and disasters, I am also apparently under siege by starlings in my office. There's a large starling population on campus, and they make a good living off rubbish bins, litter and occasional sandwiches straight out of the hands of unsuspecting students. They also occupy the buildings with careless insouciance, leaving bird crap all over halls and lecture theatres, and betraying a thoroughly fiendish and unavian intelligence in their ability not to hurtle into closed windows, but to flip derisively through appropriate gaps. Possibly a junk food diet has caused unnatural mutations. Also, Hitchcock. She says darkly.
I left my window open while I was in a meeting yesterday, and a pair of starlings clearly flew into the office while I was out and had a good old explore, leaving bird crap all over student forms, important documents, my offical faculty stamp, and a random selection of Sookie Stackhouse novels I was lending to a student. (MA thesis on vampires and immortality). Miffed, I closed the window to leave only a tiny crack open, upon which the two culprits immediately spent the rest of the day sitting outside and craning in through the crack to look at me reproachfully, whistling rude things to each other about my lack of compassion. Honestly, they're more like cats than birds: that absolutely narcissistic self-will, and desperate need to be in a space simply because they're being excluded from it. (cf Hobbit outside the bathroom door). Starlings always remind me of Todal.
This is not a good photo, they move around a lot. Either that or they have stealth technology which blurs them.
