NOISY MAGPIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 763, 5 March 1954, Page 16

NOISY MAGPIES

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY_9

WAS surprised today to see Andy, a peaceful man, who can’t drown kittens, stalking magpies with a gun in his hand and the light of battle in his eyes. He is such a devoted gardener that I thought at once of his potatoes and peas, walnuts, apples, and plums. But that was not the trouble at all. It was "the confounded noise." Magpies wake

him at daylight. They disturb his forty

winks after lunch. . They chortle at him when he is weeding and hosing. They jeer at him from his neighbour’s trees when he clears them out of his own. They frighten his chickens and disturb his hens. Of all these sins magpies are undoubtedly guilty. They are noisy, cheeky, occasionally destructive, and always contemptuous of clocks and_ timetables. But their noise is not a noise to me. It is music. I wake about daylight, in any case, but it is most pleasant to me when magpies contribute to my waking -when I come to myself dreaming that I am listening to them and then realise that I am. Yet they are a comparatively recent addition to my experiences. They

had not reached Otago when I was a boy, and I don’t think they are far south of Oamaru yet; though I have seen them near Mount Cook, and been told that they were in the Eglinton Valley. Noises, of course, are partly in our ears and partly in our nerves. The moment we admit that a noise is a noise it is one. Dogs bark, roosters crow, sheep bleat, trees moan and creak al] day and all night. We hear it all without knowing that we hear it: without thinking that we would sooner not hear it; without trying to resist it; and even when we are dimly conscious of it, without allowing ourselves to feel it as an irritation. When I was a_ student I shared a bedroom, with a brother who had stretches of night work and might come home at three in the morning. He was so anxious not to disturb me that he took his boots off outside, crept up the stairway in his sgcks, undressed in the dark, and slid silently. into bed. But I was »sillly enough to lie waiting for him to come, selfish enough to resent his coming at that hour, undisciplined enough to get ‘a hot head while I waited, and near enough to neurasthenia to get half cranky at every creak of the old

steirway and the almost noiseless noise of the brush as he ran it over his hair before getting into bed. The next stage in these cases is a mental hospita] or a

shattering kick in the seat of our self-importance-the kind of kick most men get when they go into a musterer’s hut or a military camp; the kind it would

have been good for Carlyle to get before he settled in Cheyne Row. I don’t think he would have written better books; but he would have reduced the number of books written about him, and saved him--self a lot of money that he afterwards wasted on his sound-proof walls. ~~ ae as

FEBRUARY 11

> " Wry do cows fear stable-flies and horses take panic at bots? I know that stable-flies can bite, and that the bite’ can ‘be painful for about half a second, but if I were cased in cow-hide I don’t think it would worry me much if all the stable-flies in the neighbourhood settled on me at the same.time.

it does, however, greatly’ worry my two cows if a single

fly settles on them, and to be able to milk them in peace these hot dry mornings I spray their legs, bellies and necks with DDT. That is effective while it lasts, though it often means that my ankles and arms provide the blood that the flies can’t get safely from the cows. I have to suppose that they, do get blood from cows, though I can’t think how they do it. The bot-fly is a different story. It is not a blood-sucker, as far as I know, and has no skin-piercing mechanism at either end, It just lays its eggs where they are most likely to get into a horse’s mouth and stomach-on the long hairs under the jaw and on the forelegs. Though it can stampede horses, their fear of it, Jim has explained to me, is protective-a kind of racial awareness of the danger of collecting the eggs. That it a possible but to me. personally a difficult explanation. It implies-either that animals know, without any. experience, what is dangerous, or that they can combine and register cause and effect in their brain ‘cells, It seems as bold to make instinct purposive as to give animals a sense of right and Vea + ke

FEBRUARY 14

i | sy [t is, I suppose, jealousy that makes so many stay-at-homes question the adventures of travellers. We still refuse, after nearly. 34% centuries, to accept

Raleigh's report on the Orinoco. Though Livingstone got a. good hearing when he returned to Scotland with the Victoria Falls in his pocket, the Scots had

questioned Mungo Park 50 years

earlier. When Marco Polo told his story-in jail, like so many famous travellers-no one believed it, and we still laugh at Jonah and Baron Munchausen. But it is difficult for little men to keep up with big men. I am waiting with some interest to see what happens to T. E., Lawrence, now that the debunkers are on his heels, and I wish I could’ be sure that Hillary and Tensing are safe. In the meantime, I have been reading Brian Fawcett’s story of his father, Colonel P. H. Fawcett, who disappeared 25 years ago in unknown Brazil, and I wish he had been a less trusting editor of his father’s papérs. I don’t mean less trusting of ‘his father, but less trusting of his father’s contemporaries and travelling successors. It would have been impossible in another 50 years to disprove anything the Colonel had recorded in his diaries, but. letting the world have it now is giving it a chance to make a fool of the father and knowing that the world will do it. Take this simple instance. A pack mule falls over a precipice, but on the way tothe rocks a thousand feet below its load catches between two trees and it hangs there in space. As rescue is impossible the poor brute has to be shot-a hor-. tible business, since the mule in the meantime is quietly cropping the leaves of the branches from which it is hanging. I don’t think it was a filial act to throw that sop to the scoffers. If I were an explorer, in space or in the spirit, I would not tell my story till | all my questioning contemporaries had died. I would be dead,, too, of course, but it has never been'true that dead men tell no tales. I could tell some hairraising tales if I were dead-and when I die I perhaps will tell them-but if I told them now some smart Alec would pull them to pieces, point out inconsistencies, and end by proving that I had twice at least exaggerated. (To be es continued)