Good morning, Newdists. Hope you all are safe and keeping that way.
Diary bird — Philippine Dwarf-Kingfisher — Ceyx melanurus
We have a very interesting diary bird today.
This cute feathered wonder is a rarity. The species was first documented by a German naturalist to whom the species was described, in 1848. Another subspecies was described to the Steer Expedition in 1890. There are three subspecies.
It is a difficult bird to find:
It has eluded scientists for over a hundred years because of its behavior. It is difficult to see as it perches quietly and darts invisibly from perch to perch.
But thanks to Miguel David De Leon, a Filipino field biologist and director of the Robert S. Kennedy Bird Conservancy, we get a glimpse of the beautiful bird that is sadly threatened with extinction.
"The Robert S. Kennedy Bird Conservancy is a group of eight field workers and bird photographers that documents birds and habitats, contributing data previously unknown to science, with the ultimate goal of conserving species and ecosystems," says De Leon in an interview with Esquire Philippines.
The eight member team were not ornithologists. Instead, the diverse membership was composed of an artist, two pilots and a military strategist, among others. The one characteristic they all had in abundance is patience, as they spent long days in constructed hides, from sun up to sun down while also being sensitive to any changes in bird behavior, at which point they’d back off. With these strategies:
[...] they can learn things that might otherwise require more disruptive methods, Dr. De Leon said. In 2017, for example, he and a few others published a paper detailing the South Philippine dwarf kingfisher’s dietary habits, which they pieced together over years of watching parents bring food back to the nest. (They eat a lot of skinks, and no fish.)
This took extra dedication, as the South Philippine dwarf kingfisher is particularly hard to spot. “It perches quietly and darts invisibly from perch to perch,” Dr. Kennedy’s bird guide warns.
And as Dr. De Leon’s group soon found, the fledgling is even sneakier. While birds of other species often stay close to their nests while learning to fly, the young kingfishers rocket away. “Even if we’re watching them closely, they just disappear,” he said.
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Please, Newdists, grab a cup of coffee and something to eat, and join us in the thread.
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Lachrymatory
Those bottles are described as Lachrymatories — tear catchers. Allegedly an old tradition with roots in the Old Testament? —
“Thou tellest my wanderings; put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” ~~ Psalm 56:8; King James Version This passage in Psalm 56 is often mentioned as the beginning of the tradition. However, like many other verses, this particular one is translated differently in several different Bible versions. “Record my misery; list my tears on your scroll – are they not in your record?” ~~ Psalm 56:8; New International Version There is no mention of putting tears in a bottle in this translation. But there is a footnote next to the phrase “list my tears on your scroll”. The footnote reads: “put my tears in your wineskin,” which is closer to putting them in a bottler than listing them on a scroll. Either way, the sentiment is the same: “Take note of my tears, O God. Wipe them away for me; help me grieve, for I cannot do it alone.” Was there a tradition of gathering tears into a bottle at the time of David? It’s not known for certain, but David wrote those words and there is evidence of small bottles found in ancient tombs of the extremely wealthy. LINK, originally from LINK.
It’s an interesting folklore. Wow. People collecting their tears in bottles. And then those bottles end up on Ebay or Etsy, hundreds of years later. Creepy, just a bit. Weird, a lot.
But interesting, do you not agree?
So I began looking into it. Not much there from a proper source. It’s a weird idea that people cried into bottles. What did they think they were doing, collecting their tears? Evidently people like the idea, given how much money some of these bottles cost.
The information heavy internet had very little on this as a tradition, or even listed as folklore. They look like perfume bottles. Very nice ones. And then —
Uh…. Well! Lets turn this thing around now.
As it turns out, it is a good marketing ploy:
The myth likely began with archaeologists and an oddly chosen term. Small glass bottles were often found in Greek and Roman tombs, and “early scholars romantically dubbed [them] lachrymatories or tear bottles,” writes Grace Elizabeth Arnone Hummel, who runs the perfume website Cleopatra’s Boudoir. Those glass bottles held perfume and unguents, not tears, Hummel explains. “Scientists have performed chemical tests on these flasks and they disproved the romantic theory.” But stories sometimes acquire their own momentum.
Nathan Graves, owner of Cemetery Gates in Portland, Oregon, first stumbled across tear catchers while researching mourning jewelry. He was suspicious immediately, because the bottles look identical to ones he’d seen in antique shops, flea markets, and yard sales for as long as he could remember. “Always thought of them as grandma’s perfume sample collection,” he says. “The idea that people were collecting tears in them seemed like folklore.” The terms “Victorian” and “mourning” in general, Graves continues, have become catchalls for anything old, sentimental, or made of black materials. “I think some people have the tendency to romanticize objects and their history. ✂️
According to a 2004 article in Belgrade News, the owners of the largest wholesale distributor of Tear Catcher Gifts’ modern bottles, Timeless Traditions, were inspired by the 1996 bestselling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which a character gives her mother a lachrymatory. “I looked everywhere [for them],” coowner Jacqueline Bean told Belgrade News. “[I] found no bottles but I did find all these women who had read the book and were looking for them too. … Our goal was to saturate the market as quickly as we could to keep competition at bay.” The bottles are available at dozens of stores, both online and off, and several “informative” sites appear to exist entirely to drive customers to purchase them.
Oh well, another well cultivated poetical conceit bites the dust.
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