Spangled Drongo

Notes:

This series shows a Spangled Drongo cleaning its beak after having its breakfast - a thick white grub the size of my finger. (Unfortunately I missed the grub while I went to get my camera!) Spangled Drongos have glossy blue-black plumage with iridescent green spots on the wings and white spots on the breast, red eyes and a distinctive forked tail. The word 'drongo' is also Australian slang for 'idiot' or 'fool' - I was wondering how this came about as Spangled Drongos seem to be very smart birds. 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/...