Birds

An essay on my relationship with birds

It was, as I recall, a morning in February 1985 when my good friend Peter and I arrived at a factory in the industrial suburb of PhIt was, as I recall, a morning in February 1985 when my good friend Peter and I arrived at a factory in the industrial suburb of Phoenix, north of Durban. I had been invited to visit an ailing business that was in need of some remedial action and my thoughts were on the prospect of a new career. As we alighted from the rental car and started towards the factory entrance, Peter glanced up and said off-handedly, “red-billed woodhoopoes”.  I looked quizzically at him and he raised his head in a skywards gesture. “Those birds �" they were red-billed woodhoopoes.”

“What!!” I thought. “Those are birds �" but how did he know what they are?  They are flying fast and quite far away……”

And from that moment on I became enraptured with these remnants of the dinosaurs �" birds. Big birds, little birds, brightly coloured ones and “little brown jobs”, those drab little fellows; the warblers, cisticolas and larks that are the nightmares of the novice birder. In time I came to realise that if I took the time and trouble to actually look and not just see and I armed myself with a source of knowledge of birds, a whole new world would be opened to me. And so I became an avid birder, and ever since have been enchanted by these wonderful creatures that make their living and their home in the air currents of this “small blue dot”[i].

Some years later my then sister- and brother-in-law accompanied my family on a trip the Kalahari Gemsbok Park now the Kgalagadi Frontier Park) an arid jewel among the other National Parks of South Africa. They were not at all interested in birds, but at the sight of a Giant  Eagle (Verraux’s) Owl sitting quietly in an acacia tree they were captivated and instantly transformed as if evangelised, also falling under the spell of birds.

Thousands of people, myself included, will spend endless hours, binoculars glued to our faces watching birds. We birders come in all shapes, sizes and backgrounds, mellow and weathered, young and callow, male and female. What beguiles us so?

In the film “G.I. Jane”, Vigo Mortenson’s character Master-Chief John Urgayle, typifies the stoicism and steadfastness that he expects from his SEAL recruits by quoting D. H. Lawrence’s words from “Self Pity”: “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

Now I suppose that the ability to endure hardship is something that is inherently heroic about all wildlife and not just birds, that have to cling to life to survive, sometimes in the face of the most severe and adverse circumstance. This is, I suppose a truism. But for me, it is the sheer happiness that birds seem to continually express that really ennobles them. It is said that birders must be optimists as they are always looking up �" I expect there is a grain of truth in this adage. However I suspect that we birders have our spirits uplifted by the natural effervescence that one experiences when observing these feathered, free-flying aerobats.

Birds are born to fly. And I really detest seeing birds in cages. Deprived of their freedom of the sky they are doomed to sit out their lives in a cage for the sake of allowing a human to possess it. What a dreadful price to pay for a “higher” being’s whim. I have lived much of my life at the coast and always marvel at the sheer joy of flying that gulls seem to display �" they seem to just want to fly, to soar wheel, dive and climb as the wind currents eddy and blow, giving them licence to perform their aerial manoeuvres and seemingly just for their own pleasure. In his book “A Gift of Wings”, Richard Bach gives his version of why flying an aircraft is for him, a freedom unequalled by other human experience. His character Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, in the book of the same name, does this for avian life as typified by gulls.

The variety of beauty in colour, form and song, motivate painters, photographers and writers of  prose, poetry and music to attempt to capture the essence of birds. So whether or not one is a birder, most people interact with birds, sometime and somewhere. Even Dorothy sang plaintively ”if birds fly over the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?” But what is the essence of birds? It might be the sprightly hop of a warbler, robin or waxbill. Then again, the majesty and almost aloof bearing of an eagle conveys  in its own way just what it is that makes an eagle an eagle. Birders have a word that encapsulates the immediately recognisable characteristics of a bird �" its “jizz”. This is the manner it presents itself in its habitat; how it moves, sits or holds itself in a position, its general colouration, size and so on. The jizz is the first thing an experienced birder tries to capture, the initial the clues to its identity.

The one over-arching characteristic that sets birds apart from other animals is, for me, cheerfulness. Ever seen a sad bird? Serious or studious owls, deliberate storks, yes. Cheeky tits, raucous crows and busy, industrious weavers, sure. But sadness is certainly not something I would readily ascribe to any. They just seem upbeat all of the time. I know this is an anthropomorphic view and that they, as are most other animals, probably to a great extent emotionless. Most likely they just get on with their lives while we humans assign to them the words that express our own feelings and emotions.

September 1 has come and gone. According to popular belief, the beginning of spring in the southern hemisphere. But to science that only occurs around September 22, the Spring equinox. But really, who cares which is fact and which is myth? More importantly, all around the northern climes, the onset of the cooler weather arouses an instinctual awakening that causes untold numbers of creatures, and more particularly birds, to shuffle restlessly as they turn their heads towards other places, some of these ridiculously distant in terms of their own tiny size. Those in the North will figuratively  pack their bags to head South, knowing without knowing that that they must journey away from the current homes that have sustained them over the summer months, but which will soon turn icily hostile.

The South will offer them succour and warmth and they will soon take to the air in their hundreds of thousands to make their collective ways to those faraway places. They will cover vast distances and endure unbelievable hardships along the way. The sheer magnitude of the journey is but one. Some will be of Nature’s making such as inopportune headwinds or unseasonable weather patterns. If this is not enough they will also have to endure some that are due to humankind’s irrational desire to destroy harmless others for an unfathomably horrible desire to kill for pleasure.

It is a tragedy of almost unbearable proportion that even in modern and supposedly enlightened and cultured societies such as those in Europe and North America, people wreak havoc on these joyous, beautiful creatures, shot-gunning them for “sport” in their thousands if not millions, as they follow their predestined migratory routes. Passerines, raptors, waterbirds and song-birds �" all are fair game

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How utterly pathetic, inhumane and wasteful. And frankly, ultimately degrading of the human race.

 

[i]  Planet Earth as described by the late cosmologist Carl Sagan