The Bird's Wedding Day*

This post comes a couple of days after Valentines Day, but I can confirm that the first bird I saw on Valentines Day this year was a blue tit (or rather, two of them). Tradition has it that an unmarried woman can gain a useful insight into the nature of her future husband from the first bird she sees on Valentines Day:

http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/5005749.Why_you_should_look_out_for_the_birdie_on_Valentine_s_Day/

I didn't write this post on Valentines Day as I had a particular picture of a blue tit that I wanted to scan in, from this picture book I have called "A Colour Guide to Familliar Garden and Field Birds, Eggs and Nests". The images are wonderful; a page for each bird, with the bird itself in colour and it's nest/habitat as a pen and ink drawing.

BUT my scanner is currently out of action. It appears that since I used it last, I had mislaid the power cable. So I went into town to buy a replacement cable, only to get home and realise I had also lost the cable that connects it to the USB port on my laptop... 

So instead, here is an equally lovely blue tit illustration that I came across recently:

 

This picture is from one of the cutest zines I have read in a while - "The Smell of The Wild" by Gareth Brooks. It's a collection of drawings and poems about the British Countryside. (Consider this a reproduction of part of the zine for review purposes, and check out more of his work at http://www.appallingnonsense.co.uk/!)

I have no plans to marry (in fact I would go as far as to say I plan not to get married), so it is of little practical use to know that my 'future husband' will apparently have money (due to the yellow on the blue tit's tummy)! 

But I do find it fascinating the way that people make up explanations for things that they can't understand, or link together two apparently unrelated occurances to give their lives more meaning. 

I remember when I was in school, whenever we saw an aeroplane trail in the sky, in meant someone was thinking of you, and moreover the number of trails equated to the hair colour of that person. Or when you ate an apple you would twist round the stalk until it came off, or pull petals off a flower until there were none left, repeating to yourself "he loves me, he loves me not"...

It's actually only in the past few years that I have managed to stop using the apple stalk method to gauge the level of interest from my crushes, in favour of more hands-on methods like just talking to them.

 
*Apparently Valentine's Day was called the Bird's Wedding Day long ago as it was believed that birds selected their mates and began to breed on February 14.