If you have the wings, then use them!
AS OF TUESDAY last week, Kimberely has had to do with one less streptopelia capicola. Look, it was a terribly sad misunderstanding, a tragic miscalculation and a terrible misjudgment that led to the streptopelia capicola’s untimely demise.
But it could have been avoided.
The streptopelia capicola, also known as the Cape turtle dove, or as we used to call it the ‘Tottie’, is quite a common bird.
In fact, they are so common that the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List classified this bird species as ‘Least Concern’.
But I wonder if they will update this classification after Tuesday’s tragedy.
Totties are not very bright; let’s just be honest. I have watched them bullying smaller birds away from the seed in our backyard, but they get so focused on protecting the seed that they themselves forget to eat … every single time.
Another characteristic of the tottie that I have come to loathe is how casual – let’s call it lazy – they are when you approach them with your car. They will stand around as if they do not have a care in the world. Then after – only AFTER – you brake and kill your car’s forward momentum do they fly off; usually in the wrong direction. Then they have to turn and fly back across the path of your oncoming car.
I could never understand why our streets are not littered with their lethargic carcasses.
But on Tuesday, one tottie’s luck ran out. I was in Beaconsfield Main Road going at an easy 40- to 45km/h; I wasn’t in a hurry and it being the middle of the month I was doing my best to conserve fuel.
And then I spotted the roadblock. Two totties seemingly blissfully unaware that a hunk of metal weighing over a ton was barrelling toward them. Martha the tottie must have felt uneasy and walked off towards the kerb, but Andries cooed after her, “Marta, look how I make de kar pull brakes!”
Braking and accelerating unnecessarily eats up your fuel so I eased off the throttle a bit, doing my bit for animal conservation to give the stubborn streptopelia capicola every opportunity to move out of the way. And I swear that he looked as if he was going to fly off. On three or four occasions he actually motioned as if he was going to fly off.
I actually believed that I was going slowly enough to give Andries enough time to fly off, while Andries, for his part, thought I would brake.
We were both wrong. He took off only when the car was above him. There were lots of feathers.
I was horrified. No matter how much I tried to console myself with the facts that I was going slowly AND I slowed down, also that the bird didn’t fly off in good time, and that I was concerned about my fuel
bill, I still felt horrible.
I know that turtle doves are monogamous and mate for life.
Martha, or as Andries called her ‘Marta’ became a birdwidow because her lazy, late bird-husband didn’t develop the habit of flying off before danger was on top – literally on top – of him.
That’s the risk many birdbrained – maybe I should call it ‘tottie-brained’ – humans seem to be running. I believe that if we fail to develop habits of diligence and industry we become flat, lazy, unmotivated. And when the pressure to perform comes along, however slowly, we get run over.
There were those youngsters at school who would play their way through the year, and when exams came they had stacks to learn and tons to study – needless to say, their results were unimpressive. Chronic laziness is not easily overturned.
Even when you get into an office environment. You can pretend to be a hard worker, you can ‘flap’ around the office extravagantly; you can fool the boss, you can fool the company, you can even fool yourself. But if you are not actually busy DOING your job and developing skills and habits of diligence even your feathers can fly one day.
Don’t we all know that one or two (or more) colleagues in the office who always seem to be ‘busy’ but never seem to get any real work done?
We even know about officials and bigwigs who will pose for those strategic photoshoots in overalls with shovels and hard hats to show how ‘committed’ they are to rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done.
I have never been impressed by those photo opportunities, because after the images appear on social media the official fades into the ether again.
So, in conclusion, the logic is simple: if you’re a bird reading this newspaper and you have wings, then use your wings to fly away from approaching predators and motor vehicles. And if you are a human being with a job, then remember, HAVING a job is not the same thing as DOING your job. Get busy.
I mean think about it, Antonin Sertillanges makes it even clearer saying, “The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.”
On the flipside, the result of laziness and indolence is like a certain streptopelia capicola that finally did something useful when he filled a Beaconsfield pothole last week.