BIRDS OVERHEAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 9

BIRDS OVERHEAD

By

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 2

\ ISDOM after the event is not the

" "highest kind of wisdom, but it is better than no wisdom at all. When the apocryphal Tobit, not knowing that there were sparrows above him, lay down against a wall with his face uncovered, and his eyes being open, "the sparrows muted warm dung into them," he was a proper subject for pity. But he would not have deserved pity

if he had lain there a second time. Magpies are bigger than

sparrows, worm-eaters and giuttons, but those facts have. not stopped me from resting my hand three times lately on the top of a post on which magpies have rested first. It happened once in daylight, and each time I have forgotten the probabilities until they were certainties. If Tobit had been as slow to learn he would have spent the rest of his days in darkness, since a whiteness came in his eyes after one filling, and the physicians helped him not. Nor was it his own prayers that moved the Lord to "scale away the whiteness of Tobit’s eyes," but the prayers of Sara, the daughter of Raguel, who had buried, and had been charged with strangling, seven husbands, It pleases me that the Lord found it easier to forget Sara’s record than the sanctimoniousness of the man who boasted that he had walked all the days of his life in the way of truth and justice, and done many alms-deeds to his brethren and his nation. I suspect that Burns had read the book of Tobit before he met and immortalised Holy Willie. : * % a

FEBRUARY 3

| AM not surprised when I see magpies on posts or high platforms, or pigeons, or common fowls. It does surprise me when I see gulls frequenting such places. There is a third floor in the city to which duty sometimes drags

me, and as often as I am there I see a gull balanced on top of a

flag-pole erected on an adjoining roof. How long it stays there I don’t know

but I have had it under observation for an hour, and could easily believe that it stays there half. a day, and leaves only when it feels hunery. It does not, of course, stand all the time, or remain in one position. In general it faces the wind, standing or sitting, and when there is no wind it stands on its feet one at a time, the idle foot and leg being folded, out of sight. This attitude I find quite disturbing, so that I have to discipline myself as I watch or look away. It is not as upsetting as looking at a sailor on a high mast at sea, but it does something to my head and solar plexus that I can

counteract only by shutting my eyes. lo the gull, however, it is apparently a most comfortable position-so comfortable that it occasionally folds its head under its wing without bringing down the other foot and goes to sleep. I suppose steeplejacks reach something like this unawareness of height after years of climbing; but birds are born with it. If they have the same kind of mechanism as we have for indicating their position in space-fluid-filled canals in their earsthese don’t give the same messages as they give us. No one has even seen a giddy bird, a bird closing its eyes to shut out what lies below, or a fledgling sick with fear when it looks out over the edge of its nest. There is certainly no fear, no giddiness, no tight throat or writhing intestines in the bird on that flag-pole. It looks up and down, oils its feathers, scratches its head, squats, sleeps, stands up, stretches on a convex platform no bigger than a porridge plate. If it were not happier there than on a grassy bank of the river 50 yards away it would not come so often and stay so long. A possible explanation is that gulls are monogamous and that this is the surviving

member of a marriage that has met disaster. I find it easier to suppose that it is a runaway husband or an absentminded wife enjoying a little freedom from a nagging partner or demanding children.

FEBRUARY 7

IM, who sometimes says what he thinks, and sometimes what it amuses him to say to lift my hackles, calls this an average Canterbury summer. I have not seen as many Canterbury summers as he has, but I can go back in my ciary for two months and find only entries like these: Very hot; hot; very hot; fine and warm; hot: fine; fine and hot; very hot; fine, hot and

very dry; very hot; hot; warm; fine; cooler; slight shower;

strong nor-wester; warm; very warm} hottest day this year; and so on. What used to be a drying green is a. dusty square with not even the dandelions surviving. What used to be cocksfoot is cry straw that powders under my boots. Where there ought to be clover and ryegrass there is nothing at all, except in the orchard, where there has been no

grazing, and even there the growth is so crisp and hard that the cows are not interested when I bring them in on a rope. Danthonia is still boot-high in places, but it is drier than tussock, and has such a feeble hold in the dusty ground that it could not be grazed if the cows could persuade themselves to eat it. Jim may be right. Canterbury may often have been as dry as it is now in this corner of it. But if that is the case my grandchildren will not sit: as I do and look out day after day on thousands of acres of parched; irrigable land. They will harness the four big rivers that rush in straight and almost parallel lines from the mountains to the sea. The cost will be staggering, but not quite so heavy as the present loss of potential wealth, It is quite likely, too, that the way from here to there, or from now to then, will lead through rushes, footrot, and intestinal worms. But our children will overcome those problems when they begin seriously to study them. Then they will put up a monument to the engineers their grandfathers now keep in their gun sights, (To be continued)