Very much, thank you!
My daughter is very jealous. She has always loved peregrines, for some reason. They nest on Norwich Cathedral, and the fledglings have been leaving the nest for the first time this week – we were at the cathedral last Sunday, but sadly they hadn’t started flying at that point, so we have missed the fun. I would have liked to have seen that. But at least there is a web cam.
Hugh,
Coopers hawk, red tail hawk and red shoulder hawk are the big ones here. Most will take a bird to the ground after a mid air strike. Coopers are particularly bad as they are nimble enough to keep pace on the pigeon escape route. In all cases the hawk will strike from above with 90+% of kills being just at pigeon take off or land. We have peregrines, but we don’t like to talk about them. The folks that are near them lose hundreds of birds.
BTW. we provide our own classification for them: pigeon eater.
In my post I originally included a couple of sentences celebrating the peregrine’s ‘stoop’, but deleted them out of consideration for Jaysen’s losses. However, your daughter might enjoy As the Falcon, Her Bells by Philip Glasier (available from Amazon UK, used).
I believe there’s at least one pair on St Paul’s, in London. Any cliff-like architecture that gives them height is welcome. St Pancras Station also comes to mind. Post the DDT ban and legal protection, they’ve become city dwellers.
Recently I think I’ve read somewhere that a higher than usual percentage of racing pigeons flying from Brittany in France to England have been lost. Peregrines on the English Channel cliffs have been blamed.
Coming back to this, Siren, something else I did with my students, was to give them 15 different translations into Chinese of a paragraph in English unidentified as to the translators, of whom one was a native speaker of English — not me, I hasten to add, but someone whose active Chinese is very much better than mine — and asked them to select the best translation and the worst. With the exception of one woman student, they all agreed on the best translation — I would have predicted that the woman student would choose differently, as she was really quirky and often bizarre — though I didn’t ask them to explain why they thought that. But when it came to the worst translation, they were absolutely unanimous on it being the one done by the English speaker; they thought it must be a machine translation!
But the real point is that, before that, I had translated the text myself as part of another investigation. I did it one afternoon, sitting in my favourite coffee shop across from a friend who was writing her MA dissertation; I find it easier to concentrate when I’m with a friend who is also working on some writing. When I finished, she asked if she could look at my translation, so I showed her.
“Mark, I feel so sorry for you!”
“Why? You’ve no need to feel sorry for me …”
“But I do, 'cos now I know how you must feel having to read what we write in English!”
It was the first and probably the only time she or any of them had ever seen Chinese written by a native English speaker.
Mr X