birding

I watch Sunbirds today fluttering like trills of music as they build two nests in the squidgy looking not-palm over my head. I am sitting just upwards of sunrise on the stoep, my head thrown so backwards it just might fall off, but I cannot stop looking, watching, as their outflight feathers catch pink, gold, blue. They couldn’t give a damn about me, mere inches away and thoroughly grounded. I am no threat to them nor their nest building and they seem to know that. They perch en route to said nest building thingy, on the framework of the stoep shade, caught pistol sharp against the sun, almost a silhouette and perfectly formed. It’s breathtaking. I forget time, the pain in my neck, my thoughts and any distractions. My entire focus is on this four, and that thinks me. Are they like sparrows, nesting in a commune, or do they select another pair with whom to coorie in, or am I reading this all wrong? Their slender shape, the black cap, the perfection of body shape and wing spread is marvelling and maybe that’s more than enough. There is so much that is not right in the human world. You are right or you are wrong and that ‘wrong’ word has followed many of us into our own protection caves, silencing our voices and nullifying our opinions on pretty much everything. It is good to be reminded that beyond the rules of life for us, life is more instinctive, freer somehow within the mysteries and the magic of Nature and her unstoppable evolution. Living wild and dynamic, yes. Watchful and adaptable, yes. Able to shift and change when there is yet another deforestation to make room for a housing complex, a luxury hotel, a tourist haven, yes.

I like the Yes in Nature. However limiting the options, positive plans are made. In our world it takes hundreds of years to adapt and there’s a deal of gloom and moaning on that journey, as if everything is all rocks and dried up water beds. We could do with Yessing more, looking out and up. To keep showing up bringing our talents with us, leaving the ‘wrong/right dichotomy in our caves and stepping out into the light. What do they say now…….?

What you look for, you will find, or something along those lines. Like the Sunbirds did.

I watched ospreys today, fishing in the sea-loch on a slack tide. To be honest, I didn’t see them actually fishing, too many bent-back hazels in the way, but I did hear the shrieks, warning shrieks, a rasping ‘bugger off’ I hadn’t heard before. The gulls were wheeling, all high-pitched and taking up all the air, filling it with the squeals of schoolgirls on a home bus. My alert alerted. Damn hazels, always in the way of seeing clear, even when naked. Now that’s a talent, I thought. The chaos continued as I moved on up the track, my eyeballs almost falling out with all the futile looking. I knew there was trouble down there, somewhere. then I saw the lift of huge wings, the power of that 8/9 foot flapation, three of them with gulls like midges pursuing them. Gulls don’t even fish, I said out loud as I almost fell off a rock, my eyes, still fixed, now rolling. Creatures just don’t get it, do they, although they do. These huge birds, birds of prey are floating about like cruise ships in the skinny waters of a tidal flow and the little boats just don’t want them here. They win in the end. Amidst a great diatribe of birdswear words, the ospreys lift and slide away, cutting through the sky, hardly flapping.

I would like to hardly flap. I walked on, could feel my heart rise into a rap sort of beat as I re-met the ordinary. It thinks me. We get these bajonkers lifts, insights into otherness, and in the during of it, we shock solid. Then, when the gasp is done and the spin is over, there we are on the same track, in the same place, as if we never just visited Narnia. It’s a gift. Unwrapped it goes on forever like Pass the Parcel, when the size of the thing makes all eyes sparkle with anticipation until, at the very last a very small dinosaur, or car, or lip salve appears. Is it a disappointment? Yes, sometimes. It’s life and a learning. Tough but real. What is learned then is vital.

Our own tidelines are written over many, many tides, some when we were just learning and later when we are most vulnerable because of that learning. Thinks. Do gulls just harry, parry with and infuriate other birds just because they have beaks enough and don’t quite remember why they have them all, or are they just bullies? I stop myself there because I can’t believe anything or anyone is just just. I know the palimpsest of old, and I also know the truth of such a laid out truth, that it is constantly rubbed out and amended. And that’s a good thing. The ingress of old thinking, the restrictions, particularly for women but in no way exclusively, seeps like damp over a gazillion decades. But, and there is definitely a but here, we all have the power to egress, to say NO and then to take action.

Those big birds chose to lift, knew their power, held their voice, just lifted. I recommend it, no matter the gulls, the bullies, the ingress, the old rules.