From My Hide: Fire and bathing birds
David Holt-Biddle watches a fire and his sunbirds’ ablutions.
I KNOW I’ve mentioned this before, we don’t have a bird bath as such. The deck (that’s the Hide, as you know) is four metres above the front garden so any bird bath down there is not only unseen, but also easy pickings for the neighbourhood cats.
We do, however, have a Red Corner in the Hide. It’s an old wooden tea trolley on which there stands a red Christ thorn plant, a couple of other red flowering plants and an old red enamel plate. This plate is kept filled with water specifically for our sunbirds.
We’re not sure why, but it’s only the olive sunbirds and the collared sunbirds that use the plate, perhaps because both species are quite happy with human company and fairly cluttered spaces, like our trolley.
Anyway, ours are without doubt the cleanest sunbirds on the lower South Coast as there is an ablution ritual every day. Usually we witness the first one while we’re drinking our first cup of tea, that’s any time from about half-past-six, either from the Hide itself or through the lounge windows.
The first collared sunbird will fly in to test the waters and if they are to its satisfaction, the ritual begins, with the mate joining in almost immediately.
I must digress: many of you may remember the Hokey Cokey, a dance craze of the early 1940s that features the line, ‘In, out, shake it all about!’
Well, that tune comes to mind every morning, as the sunbirds leap in the water, one at a time, rustle around and then hop onto the rim of the plate, leaving their tails in the water to seemingly stir it up with a good shaking, hence, ‘In, out, shake in all about!’
They chirp all the way through the procedure, splashing water all over the place.
They are followed by the olive sunbird (never, ever, at the same time), which goes through much the same performance.
When I say they are familiar, they really are. We’ve had the olive sunbird nesting in the Hide and right now the collared sunbirds are house hunting here as well, apparently favouring a fonya (a fishing basket used by the locals at Kosi Bay on the Mozambique border) hung in a corner of the Hide.
All in all a wonderful way to start our day.
Now, that fire. We all know that this is the worst time of the year for fires, everything is tinder dry and ready to burn.
A few days ago we had a really bad fire in Trafalgar. It swept through much of the northern and western side of the village, doing very little damage to property, but a great deal of damage to the natural vegetation both in open areas and on vacant stands.
A lot of the wildlife will have escaped, but much will have perished. There is an upside, though, as strange as it may seem – some decent rain now could give us a spectacular wild flower show in a couple of months. Cheers!
PS: A big ‘thanks’ to the fire brigade for their tireless efforts. I don’t know what we’d do without them.
