Freckles & Doubt

When I left to do some shopping early on Saturday there was a small flock of hadeda ibises (ibi?) posed dramatically along the roof-tree of my house, against the morning sky. Rather like a boy-band album cover, in fact: studied poses, all carefully differentiated, positions and distances calculated to hint at relationships. A deliberate construction of unity and individuality. I'm still kicking myself that I didn't take a photo, if only as documentary evidence so I can pick the right bird out of the line-up for punitive purposes. Because in retrospect that was a sinister little flock loitering with intent.

During the course of Saturday, while I was in my study innocently ambling through the Shivering Isles¹ one or more nameless hadedaean perpetrators spent several hours wreaking wanton destruction in the back courtyard². My container garden has a terribly tendency to cutworm, who drowned in droves in the heavy rain last week, and the Hadeda Boy Band obviously had a field day noshing the little surface-floated squishy corpses. Which is fine, and would cause me fist-pumps of vindictive satisfaction, except that hadedas are large birds who (a) trampled several plants nearly to death, and (b) half dug up others - the soil in the pots is basically harrowed and drilled by the multiple stabbings of hadeda beaks. Have you seen the beaks on those things? like bloody ice-picks. And, crowning insult, they crapped (c) all over the back courtyard, with that excessive bowel enthusiasm characteristic of their kind, and (d) all over the kitchen, because I leave the courtyard door open for ventilation during the day, and they clearly wandered in like they owned the place. I basically had to hose down and disinfect the whole room. I'm not sure the cutworm decimation is worth it. Seriously, One Direction would definitely do less damage, or at least damage that was somewhat less scatological. Probably.

I'm feeling a little besieged, is all. The neighbourhood tomcat who beats up Hobbit is still prone to coming into the house at night to beat up Hobbit, play with his cat-toys, steal the catfood and spray all over the passage. (Where the hadedas crapped. I'm sensing a theme.) I'm sleeping with the bathroom window closed, which means my cats trying to get out or the tomcat trying to get in have to go through my bedroom window and over my recumbent form. This does seem to be excluding the tomcat quite usefully, hooray, even if it does necessitate 2am wake-ups as Hobbit launches heavily from my midriff. But clearly any open window is an invitation. Last night I was lying in bed playing Avengers Academy on my phone³, and I happened to look up at the curtain because my eye caught a slight movement of something dark against the dark green. And a massive spider, must have been 8-10cm across, came moseying out from behind it and across it like the hot contender in the World's Most Nonchalant Arachnoid heats.

This is, quite frankly, rude. Because one's body does that complete muscular lock-down thing, frozen in horror and with faint echoes of Dragon Age dialogue drifting across one's cerebellum⁴. During this involuntary play-dead manoeuvre the spider ambled unhurriedly on a dead level path across the curtain, and disappeared behind it. Then I lay there for the next hour, staring into the dark with eyes like the third dog from the tinderbox fairy tale, every fibre of my being tense, while scenarios play out endlessly: spider has fallen on the floor and is climbing up the bed leg and under the blankets. Spider has fallen on the floor and is climbing up the mosquito net to drop on me. Spider is climbing up the wall so it can fall on me from the ceiling. It's lurking on the curtain so it can fall on me when I forget about it and open the curtain in the morning. It's fallen on the floor and will run up my leg when I get out of bed. It's moseyed on out into the courtyard and I can go to sleep now. Really. Really. I can sleep now. Any time.

I eventually did, and it didn't leap out at me at any point during the night, but I find the fact of its complete disappearance suspicious. With any luck the nice cleaning lady will find it and chase it out into the courtyard, where a hadeda will eat it. Because apparently I have an ecosystem.

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¹ Oblivion re-play while waiting for Fallout 4 to download. The Shivering Isles are perfectly demented, but I'd forgotten how pretty they are.

² Which in retrospect does explain why the cats spent the day attached to my ankles, lily-livered beasts.

³ This is a deliberate attempt to try and connect me more with my phone, which I forget to check or charge or bring half the time, and which would be long since dead if it were a tamagotchi. Judicious experimentation suggests that being able to make teen superheroes dance or fly or take selfies does indeed foster attachment. Go figure.

⁴ Cole: "Too many legs!". Dorian: "Just once, we should see normal-sized spiders!"

The bird life in this garden is vaguely increasing, most notably in the case of the hadeda who has spent portions of the weekend sitting on the highest point of the house roof and whooping meditatively to himself in the approximate tones of someone being slightly distractedly murdered by inches. I blame global warming, myself.

Unusually, I can't also blame the cats for the unhappy dove corpse I found on the front doorstep the other day: it had clearly broken its silly neck flying into the big dining room window, and was moreover otherwise intact. If the cats get hold of a dove or pigeon it always explodes into approximately ten cubic metres of feathers all over the house, in an area effect which is in no way in keeping with the small size of the bird. I think it's something to do with quantum.

I am saddened by dead ring-necked doves, they're pretty and inoffensive creatures who are not prone to the slightly lobotomised, avian snickering of pigeons. What I have found, very weirdly, however, is that the dead dove appears to have left an absolutely perfectly bird-shaped impact mark on the window. I have spent all weekend wandering out there at intervals and attempting to photograph it, from a variety of angles and in a variety of lights. This was last night, and seems the most successful: while it's not a great photo, I'm pleased with the detail.



It's a rather pleasingly strange and ghostly phenomenon.

Goshdarnit, it would have to be the morning I arrive at work late (owing to a detour to allow medical vampires to extract their weekly quotient of blood) that a helicopter crashes on middle campus. I saw all the police vehicles milling about and deploying flashing lights as I drove up the hill, and vaguely wondered what the hell was going on. (My amorphous sort of thought was "government bigwig giving lecture", which says somethingorother about something, not sure what). Pics here. Not a hugely serious crash, no-one dead, pilot injured, but those are some extremely expensive-looking helicopter bits lying all over the road. Also, I am unrepentant about my basely but typically human desire to have seen the crash. It would have been some innocent excitement to my day.

Talking about black airborne things and disasters, I am also apparently under siege by starlings in my office. There's a large starling population on campus, and they make a good living off rubbish bins, litter and occasional sandwiches straight out of the hands of unsuspecting students. They also occupy the buildings with careless insouciance, leaving bird crap all over halls and lecture theatres, and betraying a thoroughly fiendish and unavian intelligence in their ability not to hurtle into closed windows, but to flip derisively through appropriate gaps. Possibly a junk food diet has caused unnatural mutations. Also, Hitchcock. She says darkly.

I left my window open while I was in a meeting yesterday, and a pair of starlings clearly flew into the office while I was out and had a good old explore, leaving bird crap all over student forms, important documents, my offical faculty stamp, and a random selection of Sookie Stackhouse novels I was lending to a student. (MA thesis on vampires and immortality). Miffed, I closed the window to leave only a tiny crack open, upon which the two culprits immediately spent the rest of the day sitting outside and craning in through the crack to look at me reproachfully, whistling rude things to each other about my lack of compassion. Honestly, they're more like cats than birds: that absolutely narcissistic self-will, and desperate need to be in a space simply because they're being excluded from it. (cf Hobbit outside the bathroom door). Starlings always remind me of Todal.



This is not a good photo, they move around a lot. Either that or they have stealth technology which blurs them.

There's a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge on the hospital across the road from our house: I hear them screaming a lot. (This is a sound hotwired into childhood memories, from exposure to my dad's falcons for approximately the first twenty years of my life). I don't often see the actual birds, but yesterday there were two suspiciously peregrine-shaped avians in the tree opposite our gate. They were dodging behind branches and giving me funny looks, hence the slightly blurry and obscured photos.



(Well, I assume those are peregrine falcons rather than extra-large pigeons in drag. My dad could tell you if they're adult or juvenile, male or female and the state of moult of each, plus quite probably their shoe size and religious persuasion. Me, I just think vaguely, "Look a bit fluffy, don't they?", thus demonstrating that I am not a credit to my upbringing. I attempt to redeem myself by noting, for my papa's benefit, that there are more pics on my Flickr page, from which he may well be able to discern political leanings and social security numbers.)

One of my students has insisted on writing her vampire essay on Queen of the Dammed. This is clearly about repression on a scale I have hitherto failed to associate with Anne Rice.

Amusing student errors such as the above are somewhat necessary this afternoon, since I'm menstrual, sore and grumpy as hell, and the continual stream of more than usually lost and hopeless students is irritating me beyond belief. I shall console myself with random photography. There's an Egyptian goose sitting on a chimney on the roof opposite my window, looking somewhat morose in the rain. Every now and then it has itself an enormous conniption about somethingorother, and flaps around honking. Then it goes back to pretending it's sort of weathervane silhouette without the actual vane part.



It's always fascinated me that birds stand on one leg when they're contented. Do you think they like to keep one foot warm, or indicate their basic subliminal trust that no-one's going to sneak up and push them over?

'Tis that time of year again! the annual, horrible, always unanticipated stupid big run thing which comes pounding past my bedroom window, two metres away from my head, at 6am on a Sunday. It comes with thumping feet, panting, talking, laughing and other expressions of masochistic dysfunction and the cheerfully sadistic impulse to spread it around to the less energetic. I spend the first ten minutes lying in bed wistfully wishing I was on the roof with a catapult*, and then I give up and get up. Of all the stupid side effects of my stupid body, the one where I can't get back to sleep again once I've woken up is possibly the most annoying.

Sleep was particularly necessary because of yesterday's trip out to the Strandloper, the beach-style fish restaurant up the West Coast, another in the line of Tinnimentum-entertainments with jo&stv. It's a pleasant drive, and a lovely, laid back, make-do sort of atmosphere. Seven courses of seafood and one of lamb, off paper plates, with mussel shells for utensils, sitting on concrete tables on the sand under shelters made from weathered bits of boats. The "shipwreck" ambiance is possibly taken a tad too far, I kept bumping my head on random floats hanging from the ceiling. Which is, incidentally, shadecloth, upon which the shadows of the gulls make lovely patterns. Very relaxed sort of day, with the cumulative effects of sea air, wind, sand, food, wine and sun sending us shambling back to town in a sort of pleasantly zombified state, to fall into bed at about 9pm, zonked.

Am v. proud of my self. I ate mussels! In garlic. By dint of closing my eyes and refusing to look at all the wriggly intestinal bits.

I also stood on a rock and recited Ted Hughes, for additional pretentious academic cred. "Wind", possibly my favourite poem of all time ever. ... The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope ... At any second to bang and vanish with a flap... a black-/ Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. I love watching gulls in a strong wind, they make beautiful patterns in the air. Strandloper has a large population of enormous, glossy birds who live on the pickings from the restaurant, and presumably conduct an ongoing brutal turf war to keep lesser birds out.

* the Evil Landlord's contribution: "Caltrops."

My, but Cape Town is getting its dander up this morning! Bucketing rain, gusting wind, cats plastered affectionately to heaters... except Golux, who is at the vet's having the third in her series of nose-freezing sessions. She's getting wise to this: when I didn't immediately feed the cats this morning (she's not allowed breakfast because of the sedatives), she came all over suspicious and we had to chase her down and corner her to get her into the basket. For a slow, dim, thoughtful little kitty she's amazingly cunning at times.

I am not currently enamoured of my kitties, so much. The other day I wandered vaguely into the kitchen in search of tea, only to find a Cape robin sitting on the kitchen counter.


(Rather exquisite photo by Paul Bright, off TrekNature.

It looked at me, flipped its tailfeathers a few times in that slightly rude robinnish fashion, and flew calmly out of the open door. I was somewhat enchanted. Apparently they have a tendency to get quite tame, as a species. Who knew.

But yesterday I went into the dining room to find a small robin corpse under the table. All incriminating teethmarks, traces of hair and pawprints had been carefully removed from the crime scene, but I have my suspicions. Am cross.

Despite a mad social whirl again (family stuff, plus d_hofryn's birthday and a jo&stv supper last night), I am stuck into the Absolutely The Last, Final, Ultimate Encyclopedia Entry, and apart from tearing my hair gently at the thought of summarizing the significance of film for fairy tale in 5000 words, am Full Speed Ahead. Go me.

Things Which Make Me Happy, despite minor academic irritations:

• Silly weblinks. The dreaded Mich, veteran of several years in digs with me, but mostly quite sane really, pointed me to this rude article about role-players this morning. It's very funny. And rude.
• Good online comics. Am now addicted to Girl Genius, which is steampunkish and rather endearing, with a nice line in pseudo-German villany, something I enjoy given my Evil Landlord experiences.
• Walking past the UCT fountain (a silly, flat, Chinese sort of thing with concrete trigrams) this morning to see four happy pigeons and a starling, all bathing madly. What is it about birds in bird-baths that's so enjoyable? I think it's the zest with which they splosh around, and all the unnecessary flutter and splash. And the cute punk feather-styles that result. I was all grumpy because of internet withdrawal (Humanities server fell over with a thud this morning), but it cheered me right up.
• Faint signs that my department may love me. I now have a telephone in my office, for the first time in my teaching career. (Extension 5366, for you fellow campus types). It has madly enabled me to phone all sorts of bookshops in order to discover that Player of Games will not, in fact, arrive in time for my students to read it. Ain't technology wonderful.

Bugger, I was going to stop this daily posting thing. I can give it up any time I like, honest.

There's a big tree in our back courtyard, which since we moved in has been clinging precariously to life and limb with whatever trees use for fingernails. It's not very healthy - large dead patches all over, and some sort of weird discoloured virus on its leaves. However, this last Year of Hell-Weather appears to have been right up its strange, Entish alley, since in the last couple of months it has blossomed madly into, well, blossoms, and then little purplish fruit. Masses of little purplish fruit. Whole stonkloads of little purplish fruit that are (a) dropped enthusiastically over the back yard, where they squish under my bare feet (I never wear shoes in the house, unless it's cold and I'm in Furry Hobbit-Foot slippers, thank you Stace) and (b) a devilish attractant for what seems to be the entire bird population of the Cape Peninsula.

This is, in fact, madly entertaining. Waking up in this house now gives me, in terms of bird-wittering levels, flashbacks to the Highveld, which has a much larger bird population than the Cape. At any time during the day the tree is the site of squabbles, flutterings, twitterings, squawks, whistles, avian acrobatics, and the occasional dull "thud" as some particularly maladjusted birdbrain flies into a window. Mostly it's whole flocks of white-eyes, who are, as I think I've posted before, dull green and mad-staring-eyed, and who flip themselves around in secret formations like an ineptly-co-ordinated airborne clockwork army. We also have a nice selection of starlings, uniformly svelte and elegant little creatures - mostly the European variety, including the attractively-speckled females. The currichaine thrushes from the front lawn also drift in and out, which is odd as I don't think they eat fruit; they tend to lurk on the sidelines looking distant and snooty. And on one occasion a sunbird showed up, causing the whole neighbourhood to erupt into the avian equivalent of whistles, cat-calls and the odd lobbed half-brick, in the typical reaction of a bunch of low-lifers to high-class glitzy fashion-wear badly out of context. The cats sit on the ground underneath, pretending slit-eyed cool, and being sworn at in Bird while they mentally revolve the possibilities of Heath Robinson contraptions for getting up there.

I have acquired an ancient copy of Roberts's Birds of Southern Africa, the birding bible on which I was raised, in a house notable for my father's dedicated falconry and general bird-mania. Currently my bird-identification skills are at the level of failing to find anything which resembles the bird I've just seen on what is probably the relevant page two hours after the mysterious feathered stranger has actually left. In particular, there's one small, enigmatic, rather shy little bird who I keep catching in the act of eyeing me from inside a bush; it's slim, dapper, discreet, and devoid of significantly memorable markings. Possibly it's actually a remote camera drone from whichever Evil Overlord I've annoyed this week. Either way, I can't find it in the bird book.

I am, frankly, surprised to realise the levels of pleasure which the whole scene is giving me. I am clearly imprinted.