Spot the Frippet: beccafico.

 Beccafico are songbirds:

Eurasian blackcap, photo by Ron Knight

They're especially songbirds of the genus Sylvia, which are small birds usually known as warblers or babblers. You only find them in Europe and Africa, but in the general melée that has occurred since scientists started being able to look at DNA samples, and therefore since the scientists have realised that more or less everything they'd ever known about the relationships between species is wrong, the Sylvia genus has been shifting about quite a bit.

This means that the Sylvia genus definition of beccafico is quite out of date. 

So how can we find a new definition for a bird designated beccafico? One that can be spotted more or less anywhere in the world?

Prothonotary warbler (New World) Photo By Mdf, edited by Fir0002 

Well, by looking at the origin of the word, of course.

And here it is:

Spot the Frippet: beccafico. This is Italian. Beccare means to peck and fico means fig, from the Latin ficus. A beccafico is any tiny songbird eaten as a delicacy.

This practice is illegal in Britain, though not if the bird is eaten by a non-human animal, so this is a day to look at the world through the eyes of a cat. Or a fox. Or a hawk.

And then going home and eating some vegetables.