It is a picture she took looking out from her parent's garage, and Jethro Tull's poem which was given to us from the Maalie King.
She reckons she'd been starting to worry about losing the passion for 'pondering,' since she wasn't at uni any more, but Simon and Maalie seem to be looking after her!
12 comments:
Plumpy, I think it would look very nice on a yellow background!
Dear Plumpy, Maalie has noticed (in the 'hunting' link) that people go in for 'Fowl Hunting' at the Mesopotamia Station. He hopes they don't hunt Maalies or albatrosses there. They are sorts of fowl, you know.
Mr Maalie,
There are lots of birds on the farm where Mum grew up. There are wrens, finches, magpies, sparrow hawks (NZ falcon), sparrows, wax eyes, swallows, spur-winged plovers, paradise ducks, pukekoes, sky larks, two types of seagull, oyster-catchers, chooks and even on good days - bell-birds.
At some point some strange people, possibly of the council or even MAF, placed at each property in the valley a pair of pheasants in the hope they would breed.
But really, what the industrious people at Mesopotamia are doing, is turning the eradication of a pest - candian geese - into an adventure.
I have never seen an albatross or a maalie at Mesopotamia which is why I'd like to go help at the Maalie Kingdom, to try them...er...I mean, see them for myself. There are kea in the hills too, but I don't really want to meet one of them!
OK Plumpy, you are free to catch the introduced species. But keep your paws off the indigenous stuff! Don't go wandering off to the Otago Peninsula!
Ooops, I'm hogging your comments again! I expect you have heard of the word "Mollymawk"? It's what the Kiwis call the smaller albatross species. Well, that is a derivation from 'Maalie'. In some dialects Maalie sounds more like Molly, (it is an old Norse word) and when the Norse sealers and whalers went hunting in the Antarctic they called these strange birds that followed ships 'Maaliemawks', and that became written down as Mollymawks. I bet you didn't know that!
Wow! No I didn't know that. So the Maalie followed the ships like the albatross in the rhyme of the ancient mariner. Except that one lead the ship...
That's very interesting. So what does the word Maalie mean in Norse?
Well, these days Maalie is the Shetland word for the Fulmar (I worked a lot with Fulmars during my 27 summers research on Shetland). But I think originally the word meant something like "Stinker" because they have a disgusting habit of puking up their last meal all over you (with startling range and accuracy) when you try to approach tem to put rings (bands) on their foot!
Aptly named then!
I haven't heard of Fulmar before though?
Don't know why the last comment came out as anonymous, must have accidentally logged myself out.
Yes, there is a Southern Fulmar too, lives in sub-Antarctic waters, occasionally gets north to NZ, look here .
For some reason all your comments on both blogs have changed to anon. since I have switched to the beta system. It's rather odd as no one else's has :-\
The Fulmar have such wide wings, they must be good at gliding for hours on end?
It sems to be working now.
Yes, although maalies superficially resembles seagulls they are `related to the albatrosses and, like them, can go for miles in the wave troughs without perceptibly flapping.
Post a Comment