Birding Bond

RichardTheBruce

Ornithological-themed heroines. A mouthful and then some, @Birdleson.

CommanderRoss

Oddly enough I can hardly find anything about an aircraft called 'Mockingbird' except for a Rockwell proposal which I'm not sure ever really was called that.

Love the colours on the blue and white Mockingbird though, very much in sync with the camouflage Corsairs used in the pacific:

j_w_pepper

Lest this thread be relegated into oblivion, here's something we clearly forgot when dealing with the "gooney bird" (unless I overlooked it now):

CommanderRoss

Adding to that is this beauty of an Albatros, perhaps Bond's more environmentally friendly Q gadget?


And amongst the Ducks the Grumman wasn't mentioned:


Or the amfibious vehicle used by the US army:

DUKW, pronounced as "Duck".

j_w_pepper

Come to think of it...

j_w_pepper

More ducking of some other kind:


Plus a dose of ducking with Morricone music

CommanderRoss

Yep, was thinking of the first one too. Perhaps Trump can resatart this, erm, useful campaign again?

j_w_pepper

CommanderRoss wrote: »

Yep, was thinking of the first one too. Perhaps Trump can resatart this, erm, useful campaign again?

Yes, the dive under the desk could be renamed "the Donald Duck".

CommanderRoss

Bringing us back to 'Birding Bond'in a whole different meaning

CommanderRoss

And I missed the 'gull' aircraft as well:
Svenska Flygfabriken LN 3 Seagull


Curtiss SOC Seagull



the Bonney Gull



Supermarine Seagull (1921)


And 1946





Soko G2 Galeb ("seagull")



and G4 Super Galeb



And then there's the gull wing,

used on, amongst others, the Beriev B12


and the inverted gull wing, most famously used on the Vought Corsair

j_w_pepper

Probably not as famous as on this one:

CommanderRoss

adding to the hawk family the Soko J20 Kraguj (sparrowhawk)


the J21 Jastreb (Hawk) (very closely related to the Galeb)

when I visited in 2001 they called this 'the bigges airforce in the Balkans', it's a picture of Soko aircraft around the Belgrade aviation museum. I bought there a piece of the F117 that was shot down, but I can't find it anymore

and J22 Orao (Eagle)

CommanderRoss

j_w_pepper wrote: »

Probably not as famous as on this one:

I wouldn't be so sure, the Corsair, after all, is one of the most famous fighters of WWII, especially in the pacific theatre... Give me a Corsair in the field and a Merc in the garage and I'm a happy man ;-)

CommanderRoss

And of course the 'mallard'is a duck too, adding the Grumman G73 to the list:



and one of the most famous steam engines of all time, and once fastest train in the world, the A4 class

Agent_99

Did someone say gullwing doors?



The AMT Piranha & the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Car

j_w_pepper

Which also connects us to "thrush".

Agent_99

j_w_pepper wrote: »

Which also connects us to "thrush".

Doh, so it does! I missed that entirely.

RichardTheBruce

Remember Thrush (and T.H.R.U.S.H.) and Gulls also covered on Page 6.

Plus J.W. Page 5.

j_w_pepper

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

Remember Thrush (and T.H.R.U.S.H.) and Gulls also covered on Page 6.

Plus J.W. Page 5.

Oh, come on, @RichardTheBruce ...it's been such a long time and it's such a chore clicking through all these pages with all those pictures...all this running around, to quote Silva...

RichardTheBruce

Just adding to, not to take away from any bird mention.
(And there's a table of contents at the start of discussion, p. 1.)

Silva? I thought things were easy, just point and cleek.

CommanderRoss

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

Just adding to, not to take away from any bird mention.
(And there's a table of contents at the start of discussion, p. 1.)

Silva? I thought things were easy, just point and cleek.

so that's what he meant by 'last rat standing!'

RichardTheBruce

I think you just called me a rat, @CommanderRoss, minus comments on my aftershave.

RichardTheBruce

Frigatebird / frĭg′·ĭt·bûrd′ / noun
1. tropical seabirds with long wings, short neck, dark plumage, and a hooked beak observed in soaring flight

Latin (Fregata). French (la frégate, meaning frigate/fast warship).

Frigatebird (Fregata; Fregatidae): from the order Pelecaniformes (pelicans, cormorants, etc).
A.K.A. Man-of-war bird. See ornithologist James Bond’s description below.

Soar effortlessly on thermal currents and trade winds. Spend weeks at sea without landing—do not rest on or dive into the water--likely could not take flight again if they did due to large wings and feather condition. Known thieves of fish carried in flight by other birds. Will steal chicks from other birds’ nests.

Five species:
Magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens)
Ascension frigatebird (Fregata aquila)
Christmas frigatebird (Fregata andrewsi)
Great frigatebird (Fregata minor)
Lesser frigatebird (Fregata ariel)

Magnificent frigatebird




Ascension frigatebird

Christmas frigatebird

Great frigatebird

Lesser frigatebird

Magnificent Frigatebirds fill the sky in Central America.

RichardTheBruce

Birds of the West Indies, James Bond, 1947.

MAGNIFICENT FRIGATEBIRD Fregata magnificens
Local names: Man-o’-War Bird; Hurricane Bird; Scisssor-tail; Cobbler; Rabijordado (Cuba); Tijereta (D.R.); Rabijunco; Tijereta (P.R.); Fregate; Queue-en-Cisseaux.
Description: 38-41”. A long-winged, short-necked sea bird. The tail often appears pointed, but in reality it is deeply forked. Male entirely black, glossed above with green and purple; bill bluish; feet black; distensible throat-patch orange, red in breeding season. The female has a white breast and brownish lesser wing-coverts; feet red. The immature has white underparts and a white head. Fig.14
Habitat: Usually seen soaring high above the sea near shore.
Nidification: Nests in colonies, often on windward side of small cay. The roughly built platforms are either situated in bushes, or trees, such as mangroves, or on rocks. One white eff is laid. Red gular pouches of males are inflated during breeding season.
Range: Throughout the West Indies. Widespread in tropical American seas, and also occurs among the Cape Verde Islands and off the adjacent coast of Africa.

RichardTheBruce

For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming, 1960.
“The Hildebrand Rarity”

...
On the second day out, at dawn, they came up with Chagrin Island. It was first picked up by the radar — a small bump in the dead level line on the scanner and then a minute blur on the great curved horizon grew with infinite slowness into half a mile of green fringed with white. It was extraordinary to come upon land after two days in which the yacht had seemed to be the only moving, the only living thing in an empty world. Bond had never seen or even clearly imagined the doldrums before. Now he realized what a terrible hazard they must have been in the days of sail — the sea of glass under a brazen sun, the foul, heavy air, the trail of small clouds along the rim of the world that never came closer, never brought wind or blessed rain. How must centuries of mariners have blessed this tiny dot in the Indian Ocean as they bent to the oars that moved the heavy ship perhaps a mile a day! Bond stood in the bows and watched the flying-fish squirt from beneath the hull as the blue-black of the sea slowly mottled into the brown and white and green of deep shoal. How wonderful that he would soon be walking and swimming again instead of just sitting and lying down. How wonderful to have a few hours' solitude — a few hours away from Mr. Milton Krest!

They anchored outside the reef in ten fathoms and Fidele Barbey took them through the opening in the speedboat. In every detail Chagrin was the prototype coral island. It was about twenty acres of sand and dead coral and low scrub surrounded, after fifty yards of shallow lagoon, by a necklace of reef on which the quiet, long swell broke with a soft hiss. Clouds of birds rose when they landed — terns, boobies, men-of-war, frigates — but quickly settled again. There was a strong ammoniac smell of guano, and the scrub was white with it. The only other living things were the land crabs that scuttled and scraped among the liane sans fin and the fiddler-crabs that lived in the sand.

The glare from the white sand was dazzling and there was no shade. Mr. Krest ordered a tent to be erected and sat in it smoking a cigar while gear of various kinds was ferried ashore. Mrs. Krest swam and picked up sea shells while Bond and Fidele Barbey put on masks and, swimming in opposite directions, began systematically to comb the reef all the way round the island.

RichardTheBruce

Goldfinger, Ian Fleming, 1959.
Chapter 23 – T.L.C. Treatment

...
The girl's voice sounded from the door behind Bond. 'I was just coming to join the party but I won't now. Getting shot doesn't agree with me. But you might call that man back and make it two whiskies. Tea makes me hiccup.'

Bond said, 'Pussy, get back to your basket.' He gave a last glance round the cockpit and backed out of the door.

Two hours, two years, later Bond was lying in the warm cabin in Weathership Charlie listening dreamily to an early morning radio programme from Canada. Various parts of his body ached. He had got to the tail of the plane and made the girl kneel down with her head cradled in her arms on the seat of a chair. Then he had wedged himself in behind and over her and had held her life-jacketed body tightly in his arms and braced his back against the back of the seat behind him.

She had been nervously making facetious remarks about the indelicacy of this position when the belly of the Strato-cruiser had thudded into the first mountain of swell at a hundred miles an hour. The huge plane skipped once and then crashed nose first into a wall of water. The impact had broken the back of the plane. The leaden weight of the bullion in the baggage compartment had torn the plane in half, spewing Bond and the girl out into the icy swell, lit red by the line of flares. There they had floated, half stunned, in their yellow life-jackets until the lifeboat got to them. By then there were only a few chunks of wreckage on the surface and the crew, with three tons of gold round their necks, were on their way down to the bed of the Atlantic. The boat hunted for ten minutes but when no bodies came to the surface they gave up the search and chugged back up the searchlight beam to the blessed wall of iron of the old frigate.

They had been treated like a mixture of royalty and people from Mars. Bond had answered the first, most urgent questions and then it had all suddenly seemed to be too much for his tired mind to cope with. Now he was lying luxuriating in the peace and the heat of the whisky and wondering about Pussy Galore and why she had chosen shelter under his wing rather than under Goldfinger's.

RichardTheBruce

You Only Live Twice, Lewis Gilbert, 1967.

Location filming: Navy frigate HMS Tenby (at Gibraltar, in lieu of Hong Kong), for Bond’s burial at sea.

HMS Tenby F65, Whitby-class Type 12 anti-submarine frigate. Later part of the Dartmouth Training Squadron to train Royal Navy Officer Cadets toward promotion to Midshipmen. In use 1957 to 1971.

The Spy Who Loved Me, Lewis Gilbert, 1977.

Location filming: HMS Fearless L10 is the Royal Navy frigate that retrieves the rescue pod with Bond and XXX.
Filmed near Malta.

Frigate HMS Fearless in service 1965-2002. Britain's last steaming surface ship.

RichardTheBruce

Tomorrow Never Dies, Roger Spottiswoode, 1997.
Type 23 Frigate HMS Devonshire goes missing.

Adm Roebuck: The GPS system... Global Positioning Satellites do not lie.

M: Yes, but our Singapore station picked up a mysterious signal...on the GPS frequency at the time of the attack. It could've sent that ship off course.

Adm Roebuck: I have a missing British frigate...

M: I'm aware of that!

Adm Roebuck: And instead of decisive action, all you wanna do is investigate.

M: My goal is to prevent World War III, admiral, and I don't think...sending an armada into the recovery area is the best way to do it.

Minister of Defence: Where, exactly, did this mysterious GPS signal come from?

M: We're still investigating.

Adm Roebuck: "Investigating." With all due respect, M, sometimes I don't think you have the balls for this job.

M: Perhaps, but the advantage is...I don't have to think with them all the time.

Minister of Defence: That's enough. Now, where do we stand?

RichardTheBruce

Tomorrow Never Dies, Roger Spottiswoode, 1997.

Model Ships in the Cinema says: "This is an example of miniatures done right, totally believable and realistic, faultless execution from the construction to the photography."
modelshipsinthecinema.com/wp/archives/4146

Cast and Crew

Frigate, Leading Seaman: Gerard Butler.

Frigate miniature credited to: Robert Wilcox.

RichardTheBruce

Tomorrow Never Dies, Roger Spottiswoode, 1997.

Location filming: HMS Dryad, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, UK.

A stone frigate (shore-based training facility), used to film Royal Navy vessel interiors.

HMS Dryad was home to the Royal Navy Maritime Warfare School from WWII to 2004. Now relocated to HMS Collingwood, Fareham. The former HMS Dryad is now the Defence College of Policing and Guarding.