Friday Link Roundup, With Extra Tulips.

Here's a picture of some tulips in our garden*, slowly getting ready for their big day:


And a stack of things that I hope you will find interesting:

Here's a story of a remarkable woman - Dorothy Bennett.

Also from Jstor Daily: an article about losing proficiency in your first language through learning a second one. The article mostly focusses on war prisoners, as they tend to be the extreme cases, and it was a really interesting read for me. (I certainly know the symptom of not finding the word I'm looking for in German sometimes, and it's good to know that this is perfectly normal.)

The British Library has digitised all fourteen (fourteen!) of their Roman de la Rose manuscripts, and they are now available online.

Springtime also means lots of birds doing springtimey bird stuff. Some of these guys might not be the fluffy-feathered feelgood folks you expect them to be, though. Case in point? The Great Tit. They can be really aggressive and murderous, as that article tells us.

Finally, there's a mystery bone tool over on the ossamenta blog, and Lena is looking for ideas of what it might be. Maybe you have an idea?

 
* I made said garden stinky, by the way. On the bag it says "all-natural fertiliser". What that means is "cow shit compressed into pellets". It smells accordingly... but I'm hoping the plants will grow better this year, having been treated to the stinky stuff.