Thursday, February 11, 2021

Blue Blistering Barnacles


If you are of a certain age, and from a certain place, you remember Tintin and Captain Haddock.

Captain Haddock was famous for his insults and exclamations, and I was reminded recently of what a wonderful font of possibilities exists in the world of birds.

  • Little Bustard
  • Drab Seedeater
  • Rough-faced Slag
  • Common Loon
  • American Bushtit
  • Sad Flycatcher
  • Pearly-vented Tody-tyrant
  • Sombre Tit
  • Noisy Miner
  • Morepork
  • Lazy Cisticola
  • Invisible Rail
  • Green Mango
  • Short-toed Treecreeper
  • Bristle-thighed Curlew
  • Ruddy Pigeon
  • Hoary Puffleg
  • Dickcissel
  • Woodcock
  • Andean Cock-of-the-rock
  • Fluffy-backed Tit-Babbler
  • Horned Screamer
  • Edible-Nest Swiftlet
  • Timy Sky-tyrant
  • Parasitic Jaeger
  • Coot
  • Booby
  • Penduline Tit
  • European Shag
  • Spangled Drongo
  • Naked-faced Spider-hunter
  • Bat Falcon
  • Smew
  • Creamy-rumped Miner
  • Lesser Scaup
  • Dracula Parrot
  • Bufflehead
  • Red-rumped Bush Tyrant
  • Perplexing Scubwren
  • Satanic Nightjar
  • Tinkling Cisticola

Fish too have their possibilities, from the Bone-eared Assfish, to the Blue Bastard, to the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker.  

Just string those last three fish names along.

It makes the insults you use now seem pretty pale, doesn't it?

Oh you don’t insult?

Ever?

What a Willie Wagtail you are!

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