quick bird notes.

It is a beautiful evening and I am looking out the window as the boys toil on their art. What first drew my attention was what first I took to be a pair of alpine swifts (snunit har) . It turned out that they were these big parakeets or small parrots whose English name I forget but which are called drara. These birds are bright green but from below and at evening the colour is hard to see, but you can tell them apart from the swifts by their long trailing tails. You would think that being so conspicuous you would want to keep your voice down but the drara has a loud high short cry and I think that they were the birds that I heard gatherered in their hundreds on Yom Kippur evening. ...Not to be confused with the simpilarly named dror or sparrow. The word dror literaly means free and the dror got its name because of a discussion in the talumd about discussions over free birds, that is to say birds that are not domesticated. The most common I suppose and easily pointed to, was the dror bayit or house sparrow, which are everywhere here. What I once thought were magpies are crows. They aren't black crows but gray crows (orev afor) which I have never seen in Canada, and they are out in abundance. They fly in pairs and are actually very graceful and are sort of like a poor man's hawk. They like to play chasing games in their twos, games which seem kind and friendly and not nearly as agressive as the flirtation of say pigeons (if indeed it is flirtation). They seem to really like this time of day as do a lot of birds. I also saw a shrakrek (bee eater), the previously mentioned Middle eastern non-humming hummingbird. I learned an interesting shrakrek related fact. The word shrakrek is one of the few Talmudic names which modern hebrew has used for birds. What is strange about the usage is that Shrakrek is the word used by the talmud to translate and explain the biblical hebrew racham which is generally thought to be the egyptian vulture (nothing nearly so dramatic out this evening). Shrakrek means 'whistle' in Aramaic and part of the reason the talmud likes to call racham shrakrek is because there was a prophecy about the vulture perching on the ground and whistling as a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But this makes for an interesting juxtaposition of the egyptian vulture which certainly must be one of the largest old-world birds with the bee-eater which is one of the smallest. The bee eater does indeed make a high pitched sort of whistling sound, as I can now attest. It is almost dark out so bird watching and blogging are done for the night and now it is time to go make dinner for the boys. Over and out. J