Busy birds and ruffled feathers
By any measure, it was a particularly peculiar pecuniary transaction. This week I walked into my local bank to deposit a cheque, and walked out clutching a baby bird in a cardboard box.
The fledgling thrush had fallen out of its nest above the Kiwibank branch in Papakura and was holding the staff ransom while its mother was having a right hissy fit on the pavement outside.
To be fair, her parenting decisions up to that point left a lot to be desired.
What sort of mother raises her young in a squat on an insalubrious street in South Auckland, foraging not for earthworms and wholesome grubs but for the littered remains of half-eaten McDonald’s Happy Meals?
What to do, what to do? Given that I was already mollycoddling my son Lucas’ brood of baby Ag Day chickens, I volunteered to adopt it. After all, what’s one more mouth to feed?
Lucas, at the age of six, is already a free-market capitalist. Rather than take a lamb or a calf to the Ararimu School Ag Day this weekend, he asked to compete in the chicken category. Once his six brown shavers reach laying age, he stands to make his pocket money selling their eggs on our roadside stall. (I didn’t tell him that if he raised a prime spring lamb for slaughter, he’d stand to pocket $150 by Christmas).
Lucas was completely committed to those day-old chooks for all of half an hour. Then somehow it became my job to feed them, replenish their water bowl, muck out the make-do brooder we fashioned from a beer crate and a heat lamp, and tuck them back into the hot water cupboard each night.
Six weeks of high-maintenance mothering later, I’d be just as happy to buy our eggs at the supermarket.
Is a bird in the hand really worth two in the bush? I suppose that depends on which two birds, and which bush.
Spring birdsong is a seasonal joy until you notice that rosellas have chewed all the popcorn-blossom buds off your ‘Shimidsu Sakura’ cherries and fantails have pecked holes in every near-ripe mandarin.
I love watching silver-eyed bandits nicking the nectar from feijoa petals, fruitfully pollinating the flowers in the process, but I’m less enamoured with the wetland pu¯ keko who strip my sweetcorn cobs to the husk, or the pheasants who stole every grain of barley from my naturalistic meadow border last summer.
Only recently have I come to realise that all the birds in my garden must resent me – and my cats, dog and nestnoseying children – as much in return.
For as Steve Braunias writes in his contribution to the new anthology Bird Words: New Zealand writers on birds, until the arrival of humans, birds had the run of the place. ‘‘They were here when the New Zealand archipelago set itself loose from Gondwanaland about 80 million years ago. The theory is that the moa and the kiwi, our famous ratites, flightless birds, just stood there as the land separated.’’
Most of the chitchat in Bird Words is complimentary, whether it’s Kirsten Warner watching pu¯ keko play petanque with foraged feijoas or Meg Campbell admiring her bonking budgies. But David Hill is less kind to Bryan Turner’s ‘‘meek and dithery thrush with its speckled pinny’’, describing them as terrorists of suburbia, while Karl du Fresne takes aim at Australian magpies who launch ‘‘aggressively territorial, pathologically determined’’ assaults on unsuspecting Wairarapa cyclists.
What is it about birds on the wing that causes us to stop and ponder our place in the natural world, even if only for long enough to load a shotgun? (We’ve taken to forcibly evicting the tenant blackbirds nesting above the rafters in our converted stableblock. Their constant tittering isn’t an intolerable nuisance but no one takes kindly to bird droppings coming through the gaps in the roof slats.)
In her introduction to Bird Words, Elisabeth Easther writes of her garden’s daily serenades by choirs of tu¯¯ı, ko¯tare and p¯ıwakawaka and muses that writers ‘‘clearly cherish their finefeathered friends, in part, because all these busy, inquisitive birds help our earthly imaginations take flight’’.
But this week my imagination has been grounded, and my spirits ground down, by constant trips to the bathroom, where my baby thrush is now holed up in a cat cage, demanding to be fed tasty morsels of Fancy Feast cat food on a toothpick.
I can’t help but feel I’ve intervened unnecessarily in the natural order of things.
I can't help but feel I've intervened unnecessarily in the natural order of things.