I was musing about robins a while ago. Growing up, I always thought that Christmas card artists had never seen a robin before (UK vs US robin), but now I realize that many English-speaking countries have robins.
Birds are to scale, eggs are not.
Yes, thank you.
So basically what you’re saying is that the criterion for “robin” is any fucking bird with some red around the face/chest area except New Zealand who were like “fuck it anyway” and went out looking for the first bird they saw.
… At least ours is biggest.
I don’t know how you came to that conclusion based on this post… :D
… but isn’t the UK bird known as Robin Redbreast? IT’S ORANGE
HELLO AND WELCOME TO ONE OF MY FAVOURITE LANGUAGE FACTS
In Dutch it’s quite literally called a “redchest” (roodborstje), and yes, here too they are orange. But what we now call orange used to fall under the name “red” (or sometimes yellow-red). It was only after the introduction of the orange (the fruit) that people started calling things “orange”, after the fruit. But by then the bird had already gotten its name.
You know, I knew about a norange > an orange, but never considered what the colour was before orange.
I even knew that purple used to be what we call red, but I think that shifted earlier on.
@edsperegrine! (The two of us have discussed the difference between American and European robins. I didn’t realise there were MORE of them!)
Also, I didn’t know that the colour robin egg blue is named for the American robin’s eggs. It’s quite a surprise to see that our birds’ eggs are a speckled beige.
(Image description: drawings of the birds known as ‘robins’ in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and the USA/Canada, and their eggs.)
via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1RHKB4c
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