COAL tit?

Coal tit - is not coal in colour at all

The best named taxa are moths and shrooms. Somehow, the people who go about naming these classes of the animal kingdom have a sense of humour. For instance, Garden Tiger, or White Ermine - they instant conjure up what the moths are supposed to looked like. Fungi also have wonderful baptisers - Eartth Stars ARE indeed Earth Stars and Destroying Angel does what it says on the tin, in addition to sounding super badass. However, when it comes to birds, there are few which have names which are exciting or poetic - or even, in the case of the coal tit, descriptive.

The Linnean name of the Coal Tit is - Periparus Ater. I have discovered that Ater means dull black. Hence, the Coal Tit, the smallest of our titmice (again, what WERE they on when they named these birds titmice, some Fly Agaric, perhaps?) is thought to be very dull and boring in colour. The Great Tit, has a huge flashy chest, and the Blue Tit, its special cobalt splashing, but the Coal Tit... it turns out the Coal Tit is not devoid of colour at all. In fact it is full of colour. Lemony cheeks, olive uppers, more yellow and chrome in its chest - in fact the only part of it which is 'coalish' in colour is its head. I mean the Great Tit also has a black head, a larger, blacker head too - why isn't IT called the Coal Tit. It is rubbish.

I was GOING to do a Robin today, partly because my mom had asked me to do a Robin for her, but arriving at the bird feeders today, which I newly put out, I discovered that the birds had discovered the renewed covenant, and the bird which had done this was, yes, the Coal Tit. The Coal Tit and the Starling. 

What does this say about the Coal Tit then? First, despite its small size it is clearly very observant. Secondly, it is very brave, going head to head with the bossy Starlings, who congregate like the gangs of New York around any source of food. As excited as I was, I was not more excited than Zen, our black cat, who looked up from behind the glass and couldn't quite believe his bad luck, being so near and yet so far away. 

The birds are still deeply mistrustful of this new bounty, understandably, and so they are jumpy, abandoning the tree at the sight of the slightest movement. But they will soon calm down and I have no doubt that once established, they will feed away with great, if not complete - abandon.

I still have not learnt to draw wings full on properly yet. The delicate way in which the feathers streak down with definite colour and movement eludes my paint brush. So this afternoon I am going to try and practise this to see how I may improve it. 

I have also been thinking about the importance of the spaces between. Recently I have been reading - in fits and starts - The Entwined History Light and the Mind, and today we were contemplating the Sun at Midnight - or the spiritual reality of the Sun. The task of describing this is so impossible I don't know why we even bother. It is truly ineffable - it is just beyond language or even thought. It lives at the very edge of intuition - a glimpse of what lies in a smidgen within, but mostly outside, our consciousness. The closest we come to talking about this is the word 'love'. Love, indeed. The force that makes so much possible. It incarnates, it brings to birth... it is alchemy made flesh. this then made me think of not what we can sense but the spaces in between. So far my life has been about thinking about the stepping stones - but what if I started thinking about the spaces in between - and how it made everything possible - was, or is, that where love lives? That space between. 

And so, the Coal Tit. The shabbily named bird. Not coal at all.