We are drinking tea, Kathy and I, at her lounge window. Right outside the window, a sunbird is busily weaving her nest. She is using bits of stringy vegetation (apparently, they also use some spider webs) and shreds of fabric that Kathy has purposely left out. So it’s quite a pretty, arty affair.
It is probably a malachite sunbird; these tiny birds are quite prolific around here. This little brown thing is a female; the males are the brightly coloured ones. There has been a flurry of bright green wings at my bedroom window: that’s a male.
Rollercoaster
Kathy seems to have a particular pull for birds. For a while, a red-collared barbet moved in with her and Phil. They called him Rollercoaster because of the way he flew at them and over them. He became a beloved pet. They would even get babysitters (birdsitters?) for him when they went away. He would love to sit on visitors’ heads and nibble on their ears.
And then, one day, probably when he was in his adolescence, Rollercoaster upped and flew away. He settled with a couple on the other side of the village for a week or two, and then moved on. K and P were very sad, but understood it as the way of things.
We watch the sunbird in wonder, and then we go back to drinking our tea. Birds, you see, are as natural as breathing here.
Bashing, smashing
A family of hornbills lives noisily in the forest around my garden, and we didn’t bat an eyelid when one of them kept bashing his large beak against the kitchen window. I thought he was reacting to his own reflection until someone kindly pointed out that he was in fact smashing his prey to death. That would explain the strange smears on the glass.
Regulars
There’s a host of regulars: the barbets that like to sit on the branch outside my bedroom; the mousebirds that scoff their way through the fruit trees; the little wagtails that dance across the grass. Among my favourites, though, are the kingfishers, both pygmy and malachite. They especially like to sit on the wooden fence around the vegetable garden, or, to give me a lovely respite from hard thinking, outside my office window.
