The Good Life Michele Hewitson
Those unloved starlings are welcome anytime – but please keep the timber stockpile neat and tidy.
When we arrived at our new house in the country, the little nesting box on the pergola was boarded up. A boarded-up nesting box is a melancholy sight.
We couldn’t understand why anyone would go to the trouble of building a nesting box in the obvious hope of attracting a breeding pair of birds, siting it so that in autumn it peeks enticingly from the splendiferous display that is the ornamental grape, and then board it up.
It seemed inhospitable, not to mention cantankerous. So we unboarded it. Within hours, a pair of starlings had moved in.
I had been hoping that a pair of common chaffinches might be our new tenants. We had never seen a chaffinch in Auckland, but we have them here and they are awfully pretty – the males have a blue cap and a rosy red breast – and they sing as sweetly as I imagine a nightingale might. It is easy to love a chaffinch.
Nobody loves starlings. They screech and saunter. They are said to be accomplished mimics. I plan to teach our pair to sing Oma Rapeti in the hope that the rabbits will indeed run – far away.
In Henry IV, Shakespeare had Hotspur have a fantasy of driving the king mad by training a starling to say, over and over, the name of one of the king’s enemies, Mortimer. I wish I had known this when we had horrible neighbours. I’d have happily spent hours training a starling to say something far ruder than “Mortimer”.
I don’t mind the starlings. They are fun to watch. They are fantastically busy. They fly back and forth all day long, bringing bits of sticks to build what must now be the nest equivalent of Buckingham Palace inside their nesting box. But they do drive me mad with their peculiar habit of bringing back enormously long sticks, which they can have no hope of getting inside the little hole that is their front door – about as optimistic as trying to get a grand piano through the door of a hobbit hole.
They drop these sticks all over the bushes under the grapevine. There must be some reason – are they making a barricade? An alarm to alert them to intruders? – but I can’t fathom it, or find it on Google. I tidy up the sticks but they get more.
In Mt Albert, I had a tame lady blackbird who would come when her name was called – Mrs Hop- pi-ty! – and eat from my hand. Greg said: “I hope your furry friend doesn’t eat your feathered friend.” Happily, the cat did not eat Mrs Hoppity. But what was to become of Mrs Hoppity when we moved?
I loved her. She was not perhaps the prettiest of birds, but she had an engaging habit of tilting her head at me when we talked. Also, it is somehow magical to have a wild bird become a familiar. It is no doubt mere opportunism on the part of the bird – but how clever!
We have the usual assortment of birds here in the country: the wretched, rowdy magpies (I was once a judge at the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival and awarded first prize to a magpie pie, not because it tasted any good but because I applauded the initiative), as well as tuis and perky fantails. A mother duck waddled across the lawn the other day with 10 ducklings in an orderly row behind. The welcome swallows, so named because they are harbingers of spring, dart and swoop gracefully and make messy nests in the sheds.
We will soon be adding to the bird population. We are getting Wyandotte chickens, mostly because The Artist says they are chooks by Gustav Klimt. They will be beautiful.
I doubt I will love them the way I loved Mrs Hoppity, who now lives at our lovely ex-neighbour Rose’s house. Between us, we trained her to move next door. Rose loves her, too. She emailed: “She is very intelligent. And quietly attractive, I feel.” People said you can’t ask someone to take on a wild bird! I knew I could ask Rose. She has, after all, a cat, darling Joe, who high-fives on command. So a happy, hoppity ending.
She was not the prettiest of birds, but she had an engaging habit of tilting her head at me when we talked.