In Zulu there is a saying, ‘Ngibanjwe ngezinyoni’ – I have been taken captive by birds. It indicates that the work of keeping seed-eaters from the ripening crops leaves no time for anything else. But being taken captive by birds has other meanings too: to enter an awareness of another sphere; to apprehend more fully those melodious hidden places of the jiza bird, observed yet mythopoeic; to hear minutely the quiet rustling in the undergrowth, the popping notes of bou bous, the little gong of the tinker barbet’s anvil, never seen but somewhere in the dappled shade of summer days. To know the trickle of the oriole, the hollow bubbling of the coucal.
Even if I do not know the scientific names of the birds I love, I know their mythologies, the skein that weaves them to the human world: the sorrow of birds, their cruelties and their tenderness, their triumphs and caprices, their artistry.
I have no sentiment about them in the sense of wanting ownership. I could not bear to keep a bird in a cage. The closest to ownership that I could come is to covet the reassembled skeletons in the store of the museum where I once worked: something in the engineering of those stark, fragile sculptures, their foxed, handwritten labels, a sense of the rigour – or the cunning – of the long-gone collector, the taxidermist’s skill.
More than skeletons, I love birds’ eggs. I remember a collection of them in an old storeroom on a farm, laid out in rows, in families, in species: from the smallest – frail as a soap bubble – to the heavy, creamy globes of ostrich eggs. I loved best the soft blue and pewter-spotted shells, the pale green and taupe, the glossy rust to brown, the ovals pared to a point, even the simple white of doves’ eggs – snowy buds, waiting to unfurl.
And, of course, there are birds which are especially beloved.
They are the secretive and cryptic, companions to the traveller on the road, the good-luck birds. I much prefer the camouflaged to the bright and gaudy – quails and francolins, little brown seed-blown sparrows, larks and pipits and longclaws which haunt the tussocks of the grasslands. There are prinias and bleating bush warblers in whose brown plumage is more subtlety than in the gaudiest wings or plumed tails.
The most tender of all is the wagtail. Small, grey clockwork creature swaying on its splinter legs, it trips across the lawn, through flower beds, along the warm brick path, companionable and trusting. Then, at night, when the moon is full, there is the crying of the dikkops on the lawn. It is the comfort before sleep, akin to the distant surging of the sea, far off across the bush-covered dunes: a wave washing in, then retreating into silence. And I know – somewhere the moon is rising over the flatlands and the sea.
But the voice which beckons to the quietest spaces of the heart is the call of the fiery-necked nightjar. On summer nights, from the most secret recesses of the bush, comes the beckoning tremble of the nightjar’s call. Mottled as the leaf-mould on which it rests, monogamous, courageous in its long migration south, the small wanderer comes home each year to its familiar dark.
Here, in my garden, now, is the Cape robin. Almost mouse-like in its sudden darts and scutterings from shrub to shrub, its swift alightings, its sickle-swift departures, bold enough to come within inches of my hoe. It has been there for years – or so it seems, busily and bossily defending its territory. I hear it as the green dawn washes in, its flutings clear beneath the chittering of bulbuls in the trees.
It has become my companion, my igugu – the precious one – associated with those I love the dearest.
