Detail Diary, Vol #9

Branches and birdsong against the dusk

January 29 - February 11, 2024

Dear friend,

The birds of the trees of Grenoble have decided it’s Spring and are singing it in accordingly. When I leave work, the sky is usually being handed off from day to night, and the birds are busy declaring themselves. The most insistent and obvious are the blackbirds, trading (or not) tunes across their tree-boundaries, and the sparkling robins. Both, but especially the blackbirds, were imprinted on me during my first spring in the UK, forming a Proustian (can that be applied to sounds?) association that I now linger with every evening, and which I attempted to describe in entry #112. I would like to spend some more time disentangling the rest of the evening chorus to get in on the gossip. (Helped along by Shriek of the Week.)

Looking back through recent entries I see that half the photos are of the same handful of trees, at the same time of evening, with birds in them. Incidentally, Substack crops them horribly so most of the birds are missing unless you click on the image—and I’m also adding some videos featuring the songs, which Notes can’t currently accomodate. But the still-bare branches stamped on hollow blue are worth attending to in themselves.

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Here is your usual reminder that this post is best viewed on the web or in the Substack app! Clicking on a Note will also take you to the browser to see its full text and sometimes additional photos. For an introduction to my Detail Diary, see here.

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The cropping on the next one (web version) is truly a tragedy, please click to see rooks three abreast.

The below is not a Detail Diary entry, but a fun little Substack exchange that requires some clicking to enjoy: in asking the Substack hivemind what the buzzword “hero post” meant (I learned that it’s an intro post pinned to the top of your publication to draw in and orient new readers, not sure why it has to have such an over the top name), I inadvertently christened a new genre of post. I don’t think my “heron post” photos show unless you click on it. Follow the original note (nested inside this one) to see others’ comments with their own heron posts. (And by all means post your own!)