Wherever you live on this earth - whatever language you speak - welcome to our peregrine falcon blog.
If English is not your main language, you can now translate any page of this diary. Just look for the Google Translation tool on the top left-hand side of this page.*
During the busiest part of the 2009 peregrine breeding season we know that nearly 10,000 readers a week came to learn more about events on the peregrine nest platform on Derby Cathedral's stone tower. Even now this blog still receives almost 1,000 visits each week, whilst the webcams themselves get around 500 visits a day.
The map below shows the typical spread of blog readers around our planet. It's good to see some of you appearing nearly every week on these maps. The more distant you are from Derby, the more your little red dot stands out. It may be invidious to name names, but "Jennie in Hong Kong" and "Ann (Canada)" are just two of a number of regular readers and commenters who have managed to make the long journey to the City of Derby to see our birds in person.
It's hard for us to really understand how effective our family of peregrine falcons actually is at bringing people to Derby, though we know many of you have made the trip, often combining it with a chance to go shopping. So if your visit or stay in Derby is prompted by our birds, do please make a point of telling your hotel/taxi driver/shop assistant/tourism officer or restaurant exactly why you've come. Or tell us about your visit by emailing peregrines@derby.gov.uk
Sometimes those little red spots on the map are easier to notice than real visitors in the street! Follow this link for more on Derby tourist infomation.
We've long been intrigued by regular visits from someone near Honolulu in Hawaii, and possibly from Cook Island or some other seemingly remote spot in the South Pacific. You guys appear nearly every week, so welcome, whoever you are. Of course, Peregrine Falcon is Falco peregrinus in any language, because scientists use one internationally agreed name. But if you've ever wondered what other common names are given to peregrines around the planet, here are just a few we've found.
- Sokół wędrowny
- Wanderfalke
- Vandrefalk
- Faucon pèlerin
- Halcón peregrino
- Falco pellegrino
- Slechtvalk
- Bayağı doğan
- Halcón peregrino
- Πετρίτης
- Sokol stěhovavý
- Сокол скитник
- Hebog Tramor
I wonder how long it will take someone to list which language is which!
*Update: Google's Translatoin Tool does seem to work with old browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0, but not with early versions of Firefox (eg version 2.0). You may need to upgrade your browser to use this tool.
13 comments:
Slechtvalk is Dutch.
I tried a few languages with the Google translation tool and they all got:
google translate Error: The server could not complete your request. Try again later.
However, grantrans.com works well in translating English pages into Danish (and presumably into Norwegian.)
one on the tower cam with prey
@Karen Anne Are you still having problems with the translate toolbar? It's working fine for me in Hebrew, Czech, Swahili, French and (I think) all the other languages.
@Sue in Bucks Thanks for your lovely comments, Sue. They're much appreciated, and I wonder if you'd mind if I copied them to colleagues, as what you've said is really helpful evidence of the value of our project to Derby as a whole - and that's often difficult for us to demonstrate.
@Pax Canada, @DonM. Thanks for your continued updates. Ironically I was watching them at exactly the same time whilst talking to a lovely lady called Helen from the JurysInn PR firm. She rang to confirm that Jurys Inn at Exeter installed their peregrine nest earlier this year as part of their plans to help the environment. There's been no interest shown as yet - but who knows what the future may hold. Whether it might attract the peregrines away from the church where they currently nest, or provide home to another pair, I really can't say.
Nick M.
Derby Museums
Hi, Nick M.,
Yes, it still fails for me in Danish, Arabic and Hebrew. I am using Firefox V2.
However, I tried it with Internet Explorer for Danish and that worked.
I think we've had this conversation before about browser incompatibility, Karen Anne. The current version of Firefox is 3.5, so I thinks its probably just the fact that older browsers like yours are no longer compatible.
I recently upgraded my own version of Firefox from 3.0 - a quick, free and easy process online.
Hi,
I wasted a day trying firefox 3, they really messed up the urlbar. So, okay I'll live without being able to read the site in Arabic :-)
Two on the nest cam
Hi Karen Anne
If you want to try the latest Firefox again but keep the old style url bar, there's an add-on for it:
firefox add-on
Thanks for that suggestion, Terry. Hope Karen Anne may find it helpful.
I've swapped over the camera feed for the next 24 hours. Sometime around 12.30-1.30pm local time you might see a set of strange people waving at the web cameras from the pavement outside Derby's Silk Mill pub. This will be the parents of Andrea who lives in China, where she teaches English as a foreign language. She thought it would be fun to get her folks to wave to her from Derby - so if you're in the area I'm sure they'd welcome a few more people to wave, too!
The Google translation can be helping and can also be very funny.
"So if your visit or stay in Derby is prompted by our birds" sounds in Italian as your birds were asking for our visit or stay.. :)))
Though can't believe such a wonder, I'll come (writing before)! It's a short trip from here.
I travelled across the big pool to 'meet' the peregrines in Cleveland, OH the past year.
It has been great and well done.. The resident male unfortunately died three days ago. :((
Oh, Gio,
That is so sad about the Cleveland peregrine. I looked on the web and it said they think he hit a window.
I have tried very hard to make my windows non-hazardous to birds, but still every so often something happens.
If anyone has any ideas about how to deal with windows, I would appreciate hearing them. I do have decals on them.
I am now wondering if the glass thing one of the Derby juvies hit has been made more safe?
Karen Anne,
I belong to the Cleveland forum as Kim in Italy. SW&Buckeye have been 'my' falcons, the ones something in me chose years ago..
Just would like to tell more than likely it was a battle and we still suspect that another tiercel played a part in Buckeye's death (at 14 years old he's not going to misjudge a building or window and fly into it unless something else was wrong or he was trying to manuver away from another raptor).
But too many falcons and other birds hit windows and I just heard about projects to avoid that and never saw anything really helping their safety.
I'm very intersted in any good idea.
Sorry for my too long post..
Post a Comment