Flash 8 Cookbook

Colophon

The animal on the cover of Flash 8 Cookbook is a hoopoe (Upupa epops), an exotic-looking bird that resembles a giant butterfly in flight, its wings alternately spreading and closing to expose black-and-white barring. The hoopoe has a pinkish-brown body, a long black down-curved bill, and a distinctive crest that it raises when excited or alarmed. Although this bird is difficult to spot when it is foraging among the leaf-litter, the hoopoe is dazzling and agile in flight. It has been known to elude both the merlin and the falcon, mounting easily into the air and climbing so high that it is lost to human sight.

There is no agreement on the number of hoopoes species, but there is decidedly one genus with five subspecies, nearly all of which breed in Europe and winter in sub-Saharan Africa. The subspecies differ only slightly in color, yet the Madagascar hoopoe is vocally distinct, which gives some scientists reason to separate it from the Eurasian and African hoopoes. All hoopoes are open-country birds, preferring olive groves, orchards, vicarage gardens, and British golf courses. An average of 125 of them are spotted each year on the southern cost of England, having overshot their northern migration to continental Europe.

Perhaps because of their diet of worms and insects, or perhaps because they frequently revel in dust-baths, hoopoes are included in the Old Testament’s list of unclean birds. The reason may just as likely lie, however, in the fact that these birds make their ...