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Spangled Drongo

Dicrurus bracteatus

Photo by ShannaB
Published on Project Noah
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Field Notes

Notes:

This Spangled Drongo visited our yard this afternoon. When I took these shots he'd just finished eating a huge green caterpillar (I missed getting shots of this - I was inside grabbing the camera)!

Species ID Suggestions

Comments (8)

No, they're actually very smart. : )
Great finds Shanna! So the drongo is not a drongo :-)
I did some research on this for a previous spotting, Daniele! The Australian National University suggests that the slang term comes from a racehorse named Drongo in the early 1920s, who was quite a good horse but who never managed to win a race. "Soon after the horse's retirement it seems that racegoers started to apply the term to horses that were having similarly unlucky careers. Soon after the term became more negative, and was applied also to people who were not so much 'unlucky' as 'hopeless cases', 'no-hopers', and thereafter 'fools'. In the 1940s it was applied to recruits in the Royal Australian Air Force. It has become part of general Australian slang." http://andc.anu.edu.au/australian-words/meanings-origins?field_alphabet_value=91
I love the drongos! They don't deserve having their name used in a derogatory fashion :-)
Thanks Mac, Argy and Kerry. Argy, I didn't actually see the caterpillar - Nath did. He said it was HUGE! And very very green. ; )
Fabulous visitor. ..ahh and the one that got away.. I bet it was only a tiny caterpillar and not very green at all 8-]

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