Rowan Wakefield

A couple of months ago, I bought a taxidermy painted snipe with my pocket money.  It came from the same taxidermist as the stoat and wood mouse.  This type of snipe is native to Africa.  Mine is a female of the species, and though maybe not as colourful as the male, it is still very pretty.  It isn’t a very large bird, but quite dumpy with a long beak that is slightly curved down at the end.  It has a light gold eye-stripe, long legs, beautiful mottled brown-gold wings, a white underbelly and a short golden tail.  I think it is one of the best items in my collection.

For Christmas, I got a lot of things, including a new addition to my collection, a brambling.  We got it from the same taxidermist as the person who did my stoat and azure-winged magpie.  Bramblings are related to chaffinches, which are resident all the year round in the UK, and extremely common, but bramblings are only visitors in the winter.  They have orange breasts, and a mottled black cap on their heads, which the females don’t have at all in winter but have in the summer, when the males of the species have a very prominent black head.