Things that have bothered you for a long time.

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Yellow Fang

Legendary Member
Location
Reading
I went to Dover for an interview this morning. While walking along, I was thinking about the song, The White Cliffs of Dover, made famous by Dame Vera Lynn during that dreadful decade, the 1940s, musically speaking anyway. My grandmother used to sing it to us when we went to visit her. The lyrics used to puzzle me even then. It goes, "There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see." What are bluebirds? Did she mean blue tits? I didn't think blue tits nested on cliffs. Was there a species of blue seagull? I've never seen one or heard of one, at least not one that was native to Britain. If she had sung, "There'll be white birds over the white cliffs of Dover," it would have made more sense, but then there were white birds flying over the cliffs of Dover during the whole course of the war, so the lyric would have been redundant. I don't suppose the air raids would have bothered them enough to drive them away.
 

Threevok

Growing old disgracefully
Location
South Wales
The Toys R Us advert - mainly the lyrics thereof

For years now, I have been unable to decipher the part that sounds like "there's millions of debris all under one roof"

I know I could Google it, but......
 

nickyboy

Norven Mankey
Written by an American non-ornithologist: http://www.dover-kent.co.uk/burton.htm

And Bluebirds are an American species that even non-ornithologists are familiar with

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Yellow Fang

Yellow Fang

Legendary Member
Location
Reading
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1789,00.html.

Its an old fashioned term for swallows and housemartins, have you heard of them?

Swallows and housemartins, hmm. I have never heard them referred to as blue birds. Do they nest in cliffs? I thought they nested in eaves of houses. Also, they are not really like geese, they just appear and disappear. You don't see streams of them migrating, at least I have not noticed them do so. Still, they're the most plausible candidates so far.
 
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