FOOS yer doos? The diarist has always been intrigued by the fascinating world of ornithology. “Okay then, do you know the difference between the Crested Tit and the Great Tit?” asked the sports editor as he thumbed through a dog-eared edition of the Shell Guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland. “Well I did until my binoculars steamed up,” I replied with a judder.

Of course, not every person has a fondness for feathers. Rangers’ acrobatic goal-grabber Alfredo Morelos, for instance, always keels over when he comes into contact with one. “He’s not that soft is he?” asked a colleague. “Apparently the referees’ association call him eiderdown,” replied the diarist.

All this bird fancying was inspired by the tale that a racing pigeon has been sold to a Chinese enthusiast for a beak-busting £1.1m. Talk about a, er, coo. Armando the doo shattered the previous record of £322,000 when he was flogged this week by his Belgian owner Joel Verschoot. “This is a crowning glory of all those years in the pigeon sport,” said the 63-year-old who has spent more time tending to the burdz than Frank McAvennie during a shindig at Stringfellows. “This is the icing on the cake.”

To the casual observer, pigeon racing conjures up images of flat caps, pints of mild and some pickled eggs as a kindred assembly of blokes gather in a field in Pontefract and liberate their birds at 6.30am into a light north easterly wind. The pigeons themselves, which can reach speeds of up to 110mph and can fly up to 700 miles, use landmarks to navigate their way home. If only the Scotland defenders had that same sense of canny awareness eh? Armando joined a list of eye-wateringly expensive members of the animal kingdom. A Tibetan Mastiff dog once sold for £945,000 while a giant tuna fish reeled in a whopping £2.5m. Celtic also got in on this particular act when they signed Rafael Scheidt and spent £5m on a breed of Brazilian donkey.

*IT’S quite the catch. If you go down to the riverbank you’ll hear hoary old yarns about the “one that got away”. Not so in the moneyspinning world of baseball, though, where the Los Angeles Angels have managed to hold on to a major league Trout. Mike Trout has reportedly agreed one of the most lucrative deals in sport – a 12-year extension to his contract worth £324m. So, just like the long-term deals Jim McLean used to tie his Dundee United players down with?

*ON this March date back in 1929, the celebrated middle-distance athlete and neurologist Roger Bannister was born. A quarter-of-a-century later, on the Iffley Road track in Oxford in 1954, Bannister would create history when he became the first man to run a sub-four minute mile Next weekend, meanwhile, we prepare to run the gauntlet of an Old Firm game. You could say it’s the 90-minute bile.

*THE walk of life. The good folk at the Ordnance Survey have released data on the 304,712 walks logged on its phone App last year. The results showed that the most popular month for a stroll was May, the most popular length was 10 miles and the post popular starting point was Edale in the Peak District. The diarist wonders if the Ordnance Survey has any data on when Alex McLeish is going to walk?

*YOU are what you eat. Take an amble up and down the streets, avenues and thoroughfares of oor toons and cities and what do you see? That’s right, folk shoehorning great lumps and clumps of food down their thrapples like a python dislocating its own jaw and swallowing an entire gazelle in one heaving, gulping movement. In the US of A, meanwhile, Masters champion Patrick Reed has already declared what he will dish up at his Champions Dinner at Augusta next month. “I knew back when I was 13,” he said of this long-held culinary ambition. “It was always a bone-in ribeye, mac and cheese, creamed corn and creamed spinach. I’m gonna fatten those boys up a little bit.” Apparently, finger-licking Monty has asked for a special invitation.

*THIS is an age when football players the world over will go down like a sack of spanners Even the kind of slight brush that Tony Hart would have specialised in has players tumbling like a discarded can of Kestrel being blown down an alleyway in a stiff breeze. The well-documented tale of Manchester City hero Bert Trautmann always serves as a reminder of a time when fitba folk were made of sturdier stock. A new film, The Keeper, is now running at cinemas and documents a life that took the German paratrooper from a POW camp to a FA Cup winner with Man City at Wembley. Trautmann famously played on through that 1956 showpiece with a broken neck. Funnily enough, Brendan Rodgers got through his Celtic career with a brass neck.