Probably happy to find open water.
Who else want to stroke those fluffy ears?
Gulls were on ice. Mallards and barnacle geese were fighting in the open water.
The last bird. Was it a magpie?
ETA
By the way, this last pictures is great. Is It a river? Is It Ice? Is It sky? I donât want to know. I like the dream atmosphere.
They are so small and cute. One can keep a sagĂźi or marmoset in the pocket, but I wouldnât call It a wise decision.
Hooded crow (Corvus cornix), also called the scald-crow or hoodie. It was on the ice on Eläintarhanlahti (Zooâs Bay).
We donât have hooded crows anywhere in the Americas (other than zoos, I suppose).
Magpies are also in the Corvus family, look very similar, and thatâs what we have here instead:
Yup, you have those, but we donât have your hooded crows.
You guys get to have all the good stuff!
Saw one hell of a murder yesterday, +/- 150 birds circling over some fields near cambridge.
Theyâre also known as carrion crows, which I find to be rather a slur. Love learning those cooler nicknames!
Varis. Magpie is harakka.
A hooded crow in Irish is badhbh. Let me take you down the rabbit hole I followed once.
In proto-Celtic, the word for victory was *boudi, and a related word was *bodwa, âto fightâ.
That word seems to have been used as a personal name element, and as the name for a God, or rather, given that itâs feminine, a Goddess, possibly in the pre-Celtic times. There is Gaulish personal name Bodvognatus, a Gaulish goddess named Catubodua, meaning âbattle-fightâ.
And in Old Irish, the /w/ became /β/, thus the name Badb (in OIr /bÉĂ°.Éβ/), which was associated with hooded crows (also modernly known as Royston crows and scaldcrows in English). So the crow had the same name as the Goddess, who was a part of the MĂłrrigna, the triple goddess of war and death.
By the Middle Irish period, other things had glommed on her, and along with the faeryisation of the Irish gods, Badb was associated with premonitions of death, attached to the washer-at-the-ford concept. But also with the caoineadh, the grieving funeral cry.
When the Irish settled in Newfoundland, they took here with them, and Bibe is one name for that sort of death-fortelling fairy that in English we roll into âBansheeâ (which in Irish is just bean sĂ, âfairy womanâ, and really isnât that specific).
The name of the bird was also used as a generic term for a scavenging bird, so it was used in the first full Irish translation of the Bible to translate âvultureâ.
Going back to the root, though: *boudi âvictoryâ was used in Brittonic as well, as a name element. There was a queen once, of the Iceni tribe, whoâs name derived thus: Boudica.
The first queen Victoria burned London to the ground.
