This pink flamingo is up so high on metal legs that I had to crop the bottom part of them off to make my picture square for Becky. (Trust me, it’s better to see extra foliage than extra gravel.)
We’ve been in lockdown too long: it’s easy to read the look on the pink bird’s face as appealing for support or sympathy because of the one at the back that loftily has its nose up. A clear example of air sneck (an explanation is here).
Finally, a yellow necked metal bird that is up close to the tree. Ā Pretty bark too! I found them all in the garden shop at Kew Gardens.
I’m sharing these for Becky’s SquareUp challenge.
Susan Rushton 
I love this and it brings back so many memories! A gardening friend always tells me that I should have pink flamingos in my Long Island garden and we have an ongoing thing about it. Itās makes me smile every time the conversation comes up and I even wrote about it in my third book. Your figurines are really lovely.
I’m glad to have brought back memories. You’ve reminded me that my sweetheart is always threatening to sneak a bottle tree into my mum’s garden – not that it would last long if he did.
I’d like those birds to fly right into my Maine garden. All right, maybe not exactly now but rather this spring. š I really enjoyed your explanation of air sneck. A great way of handling the inevitable quarrels that arise between couples.
A flock of metal birds would be quite a sight – and sound!
Oh, they would! I can hear them.
Those are great flamingos.
They’ve got nice amount of detail.
(S)he’s a cheerful looking bird anyway, and the colour pink is always lovely in a garden.
There is a clip of pink flamingos from one of the BBC Earth programmes that fascinates me – so many of them, and such strange movements in unison.
This is wonderful! I agree the bird in the background above has mastered the sneck technique (snecknique?) but what I couldn’t miss at first was the look on the flamingo in the foreground because I have that look a lot. It’s the uh-oh look, as in uh-oh-what-was-that? I’ve never had so much in common with a flamingo before. Thanks for picking my morning UP.
Snecktique is perfect. I can’t help laughing at the pink one’s expression even if that makes me a very unsympathetic person.
Ooh, I think I could give these house – well, garden – room. I’m drawn to the flamingo.
I had a flamingo in the garden!!
A real one?
If only!
Had? Do you mean you evicted a flamingo?!
Hee hee, no…..he’s been brought indoors for the winter!
It has the best expression.
My mother and that whole side of my family are from the North of England, and I don’t recall ever hearing the word “sneck” for nose. Thanks for enlightening me!
It’s casual, shall we say? Keep your sneck out would be a frankly worded request for someone not to interfere.
these are fabulous Susan, did you manage to leave the shop without buying anything?!!
I did. We were on our way to the Hampton Court Flower Show so did not want to be encumbered. My sweetheart is the one most likely to be tempted but he already has a fancy, bejewelled one and several plastic ones that have fallen over in a corner (with bird flu as he puts it, though that no longer seems quite as funny).
Ahh the unexpected benefit of visiting somewhere en route to somewhere else, you remember not to get carried away!
Very elegant birds š
We have to say so – we don’t want to ruffle any feathers. š
Judy would love one of those tall yellow-necked birds. We have some tallish chickens but she keeps them all inside except for the concrete one.
My sweetheart treasures his granny’s concrete chicken. Does yours have any paint left on it?
They look nicely weathered. That pink one would look pretty much at home on our patio š š
I like the pink one. The weathering seems half for real and half artifice.
Quirky set of birds and I DO like the texture of the bark in your last photo. Sneck must be a Lancashire term, I don’t recollect it from my Yorkshire roots.
The dictionaries in which I found snetch included define it as ‘a latch’. Of those dictionaries, only Wiktionary adds the ‘nose’ sense. My conjecture is that the way certain latches protrude reminded people of the way a nose protrudes.
The spell check doesn’t approve of sneck either. You are right – our locks used to have a sliding thing next to them that could fasten the bolt open or closed, so you might be asked to check if the sneck was down.
Oops: I meant sneck; my mind jumped ahead and grabbed the ending of latch.
There’s a surprising variation of words over a geographically small distance, for some things more than others and I suspect many words from my era may not be commonplace with younger people.