Ooh, I envy you your hummingbirds! I just checked whether we get any hummingbirds in Europe (we don't) and came across this great paragraph on Wikipedia:
In 2004, Gerald Mayr identified two 30-million-year-old hummingbird fossils. The fossils of this primitive hummingbird species, named Eurotrochilus inexpectatus ("unexpected European hummingbird"), had been sitting in a museum drawer in Stuttgart; they had been unearthed in a clay pit at Wiesloch-Frauenweiler, south of Heidelberg, Germany, and, because hummingbirds were assumed to have never occurred outside the Americas, were not recognized to be hummingbirds until Mayr took a closer look at them.
I just love that they named the species 'unexpected European hummingbird'.
And then there's the small, round, brown birds which might all be house sparrows but might be any number of species that I just don't know enough to identify.
I learnt from my dad that the birdwatching community actually has an established phrase, 'little brown job', meaning 'it's a small brown bird, I don't know what it is, there are so many small brown birds and they're so hard to tell apart'.
That Townsend's warbler is a beautiful little thing! It's like the illicit offspring of a badger and a canary. I'm glad you shared it with me!
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In 2004, Gerald Mayr identified two 30-million-year-old hummingbird fossils. The fossils of this primitive hummingbird species, named Eurotrochilus inexpectatus ("unexpected European hummingbird"), had been sitting in a museum drawer in Stuttgart; they had been unearthed in a clay pit at Wiesloch-Frauenweiler, south of Heidelberg, Germany, and, because hummingbirds were assumed to have never occurred outside the Americas, were not recognized to be hummingbirds until Mayr took a closer look at them.
I just love that they named the species 'unexpected European hummingbird'.
And then there's the small, round, brown birds which might all be house sparrows but might be any number of species that I just don't know enough to identify.
I learnt from my dad that the birdwatching community actually has an established phrase, 'little brown job', meaning 'it's a small brown bird, I don't know what it is, there are so many small brown birds and they're so hard to tell apart'.
That Townsend's warbler is a beautiful little thing! It's like the illicit offspring of a badger and a canary. I'm glad you shared it with me!