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Before
I encountered this majestic being, the highest point of my life had
been when a school of about two hundred dolphins surrounded Rob and
I while we where snorkeling in Nelson Mandela Bay. Being able to go
under the surface and swim with wild dolphins from an arms length away,
circling around us in excited spirals, made me swallow a bucket of sea
water in delirious ecstatic laughter. The bottlenose dolphins cl!cked
and ch!rped and wh!stled a language that I w!shed I understood, yet
by hearing it and not understanding it, I was able to feel its mood
in a way that lifted my soul like nothing had ever done before... |
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exquisite mystical experience, has been overshadowed by the prescience
of the Malachite Sunbird in my life. Remarkably, the sounds it makes
are amazingly similar to the bottlenose dolphin. The complexity in
his performance is only outperformed by the variety of colors that
this bird reflects. The background image (click refresh if the page
has loaded without a background) on this page was photographed amidst
a spectacular symphony of birdsong that has left me moved to religious
fundamentalist environmentalism. |
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Their
nest is lined with my Persian cat's fur! |
 Malachite sunbird chick. |
 This is the nesting mother. (I think) |
 This is great grandma sunbird. |
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At
first I had seen and heard, Mr sunbird occasionally every few months,
then I had seen him eating insects off the patio ceiling. Later
I saw Mrs sunbird, but for each 100 spottings of the male sunbird,
I would only see her a few times. But looking at the photos it seems
I am dealing with at least four generations of females, but I only
ever saw a single male in my garden over the last two years. He
must be an Islamic bird, because he has so many wives. Or perhaps
he is a Zulu or a Mormon. These are all photos of females in her
characteristic array of brown at old age, gold, yellow, and golden
green in her youth. All these birds have the same array of sounds,
mostly an aggressively loud sound, much louder in the male, and
then occasionally a much more complex twittering, more often used
by the female. But I have surprised Mr bird giving these complex
bird-talk lessons to four or five other birds of mixed common garden
variety on at least four occasions. All the others fly away at the
sight of me. Not him. He even dive bombs me from time to time. |
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It
seems as though the darker and browner the female gets, the longer
her beak becomes. She is also very illusive, unlike him, and the
older female is the most rare sight of all. |
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