A Cypriot dish of small songbirds, and by extension the trapping that supplies it. Illegal, and the reason mist nets and limesticks are set on the island at migration times.
Reference
Glossary of bird identification and conservation terms used here
The 22 terms this site uses without stopping to explain them, and a page where each one is doing its work.
- Ambelopoulia
- Coverts
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The smaller feathers that cover the bases of the flight feathers, on both the upperwing and the underwing. Their pattern often separates two species that look alike in overall colour.
- Dehesa
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The managed oak parkland of south-western Spain and Portugal: widely spaced evergreen oaks over grazed grassland, worked for cork, acorns and livestock. A landscape maintained by use rather than left alone.
- Eclipse plumage
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The dull, female-like plumage a drake duck wears for a few weeks in midsummer while it replaces its flight feathers and cannot fly. The body changes; the bill colour does not.
- Endemic
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Found naturally in one place and nowhere else. An island endemic has nowhere to retreat to, which is why so many of them appear in conservation reporting.
- Feral
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Descended from domestic stock and living wild. Not the same as a hybrid: because domestic ducks are Mallards, a strange-looking park duck is usually a Mallard carrying domestic ancestry rather than a cross between two species.
- First-winter
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A bird in the plumage it wears through its first winter, after the juvenile feathers have partly been replaced. Many gulls take several years to reach adult plumage, and the intermediate stages are where most confusion happens.
- Flyway
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The broad route a migratory population follows between its breeding and wintering grounds, together with the places it must stop at on the way. A flyway is only as good as its weakest staging site.
- Hybrid
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A cross between two species. On a town lake the word is used far more often than it applies: most odd ducks are within one species.
- Juvenile
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A bird in its first full set of feathers, grown in the nest. Juvenile plumage is often looser and more uniformly marked than an adult’s, and many field marks the books give simply are not there yet.
- Manky mallard
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A birders’ term for the mongrel-looking ducks on park lakes: pied, oversized, oddly proportioned. The build gives it away before the plumage does.
- Mist net
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A fine net strung between poles, almost invisible against vegetation, which catches birds in flight. The same equipment is used for licensed ringing and for illegal trapping; the difference is who is holding the licence.
- Moult
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The replacement of worn feathers. Its timing decides when a species is recognisable and when it is not, and ducks do it fast enough to lose the power of flight altogether.
- Patagial bar
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A dark band along the leading edge of the underwing, between the body and the wrist. On a Red-tailed Hawk it is present at every age, which is what makes it more useful than the tail.
- Primaries
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The outermost flight feathers, carried on the hand. Their pattern, how much black, how much white, and where, separates several of the gulls covered here.
- Ramsar site
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A wetland listed under the Ramsar Convention as internationally important. The listing is a commitment by the country that made it, not a protection that enforces itself.
- Ringing
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Catching birds and fitting a numbered ring, so that individuals can be recognised again. It is how most of what is known about migration routes and lifespans was found out.
- Skulking
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Staying in cover and keeping something between itself and you. It describes what the bird is doing about you, which is not the same as being wary, secretive or simply inconspicuous.
- Speculum
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The glossy panel on a duck’s inner wing, often edged with white. On a Mallard it is blue, and it stays visible through the eclipse moult when almost nothing else does.
- Staging site
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A place a migrating bird stops to feed and put on weight before the next leg. Losing one can break a flyway even when the breeding and wintering grounds are untouched.
- Tidal flat
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The mud and sand exposed at low tide, and the feeding ground for the shorebirds that use it. Reclamation turns it into land, which is why so much of the conservation reporting here concerns sea walls.
- Vagrant
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A bird well outside its normal range. A vagrant is exactly the situation in which the usual field marks are least help, because the species it needs separating from are not the ones the book puts beside it.