Birdwatching in Cambridge
SEBASTIAN TRILL shares his pearls of wisdom about Cambridge’s birds.
Like some notable TV personalities from the 70s, I enjoy watching birds, especially when they don’t know I’m there. How do I do it, you murmur (like a chaffinch hit by a lorry)?
Yep, you’ve guessed correctly, I’ve got a long lens camera: 300mm of fine Japanese lens engineering, glass so fine that even thinking about touching it will leave a fingerprint. Oh shit I thought about it. You did too, knob.
“You have a long lens too mate?”
Now with my long lens, over many hours of creeping up on young female grebes, I’ve learnt a thing or two about birds. So much so, I thought I would open up my nest of knowledge for you young cuckoos, to wrestle with my sparrow hatchlings of subheadings, for my tasty caterpillars of facts.
Swans
Don’t be fooled by a swan’s pretty appearance on the water, because underneath the surface they are actually pedophiles. Who knew, but hidden below a facade of water, are creepy old child molesting men. If you ever plan to have kids, let me know and I’ll watch them with my long lens, so they won’t get groomed by a swan.
Max Clifford has nothing on these wankers
Sparrows
Oh look at me I’m a fucking sparrow. Yeah, they are so in your face aren’t they, like a fresher running on naivety endorphins. All I do is mind my own business and try to get a photo of robin copulation, which is harder than you might think, and they come along and say, “Hi, how are you doing?”. Fuck off, you’re boring and no one likes you. Twat.
“Oh I love the Music in Cindie’s” Twat
Ducks
Who couldn’t love a duck. There’s Daffy, Donald, Hoi Sin, No 47 at Hong Kong Fusion, the list is endless. As birds go they are pretty edgy: “A pointy beak you say… I think I’ll have a bill”, “You cheep? I quack mate, it’s pretty in these days”. Yeah ducks are edgy and cool, they’d probably wear denim jackets if they didn’t look shit.
“Hey, do you like electric african bongo dub step?” “No, but I certainly hate denim jackets”
Black Birds
The female blackbird is actually UV. You thought you knew it all when you were clever enough to spot they look brown, well no, the colours they reflect are not detected by the human eye. Only with an adapter for my long lens, can I see that actually they have penises drawn in UV all over their feathers. I wonder which cunt did that?
Look hard enough and you can see the artfully drawn veins
Swallows
Do they spit or swallow? Not actually a purile question, when in fact they absorb their food analy. They creep up on worms in uncleaned public lavatories and sit on them, bring them back to the nest and shit all over their chicks. It is thought this evolved because the birds use their mouths solely for painting blackbirds with UV paint.
‘Your food’s shit Mum”
Birds. Birds. Birds. Birds again. More interesting than you might think.
Scratch the surface of birds and feathers of knowledge stick to your hands.