Trees are for the birds

I started this post 10 days ago and I am only now finding a few moments to get it posted.

This past week has been a very emotional one. My dear mum fell on Sunday and broke her arm. She is 90 years old and other complications have come up in the tests they ran. She is unable to have the op she needs to correct her break as her heart is not doing what it should, it is a 90 year old heart after all. So for a while I will be a 24/7 caregiver as she is helpless without her right arm. Hospitals aren’t what they used to be, and sadly the nursing care isn’t as compassionate as it should be. In my comings and goings twice a day to the hospital, I have experienced a sad, quirky and wonderful Durban once more.

 The hospital is on the Berea, high up on the hill. The view from the hospital is one of a sprawling Durban with all its wonders and hidden treasures, as well as insidious grime and crime. Looking out across this bland autumn skyline with its buildings tall and dim in the haze, it is difficult to imagine a Durban forested and with African Big Fivers roaming freely. 

Still standing

breaking pavements

Driving through the suburbs, some of the old Natal mahogany trees (Trichelia Dregeana) still stand, some fractured and with missing limbs, and some dangerously hollow inside and liable to crash onto a car in the next wind or heavy rain. These trees spring gnarled out of tarred pavements, but they flower and seed themselves yearly and their dark foliage still blackens parts of the Berea. It is said that the first explorers were astounded at the blackness of the hills as they looked out across the Berea from the sea. They referred to these trees as “thunder trees”. These miraculous seething Durban coastal forests housed a wealth of wildlife, but now they have been razed, tarred in, trafficked and peopled. It has taken less than 200 years to become something outside of Nature’s intentions.

In 1839, the Swedish naturalist Johan Warlberg (the Warlberg’s Eagle, is named after him) got lost in the forest near Mitchell Park and had to fire shots in the air to call for help. Elephants wandered down the Berea to the Umgeni river just 150 years ago and, not that long ago (1884), the last recorded lion left its prints on the earth near the Botanic Gardens.

Durban’s wealthiest built and lived in their huge colonial mansions right up on this Berea Ridge. Some of these beautiful Edwardian, Victorian and Art Deco mansions still stand, and some have been pulled down to make way for modern homes, blocks of flats and 

offices,and the Berea has become somewhat tired and far too busy.

I don’t want to focus on the destruction of this beautiful forest, but rather on what is still there, and a lovely early evening I spent there. After a hospital visit, I left, to the sound of some disturbing screaming by an elderly woman who could not be consoled and for whom my heart broke, leaving me helpless and aching. I couldn’t face the thought of my dirty house and making something to eat, so my daughter, Mandy, and I went for dinner at Nino’s on Problem Mkhize (yes, the same street I wrote about in my “Problem” post).

 Although this is far from a scenic spot as it overlooks the street and parking lot, it has a Trichelia growing right there in the parking lot, and several others lining the balcony edge of the restaurant. 

A loud and trembling Trichelia

These trees are the chosen roosts of the Indian Mynah birds. These Indian or Asian Mynahs were introduced to Durban around 1902 when captive birds were released. They are closely associated with human activities, and, like humans, are opportunistic. They are loud, cocky and always ready for a fight. Anyone who has been dive-bombed by a Mynah will know exactly what I’m speaking about. They are one of the most successful bird species in the world. 

They are considered vermin here and thrive at the expense of other bird species. So for the purpose of this post I am ignoring the very real, complex and worrying fact that these birds pose a serious threat to bio-diversity in Durban and am focusing on their bold behaviour and how they have become part of our city landscape. These birds have bred profusely in typical opportunistic style, and have taken over the city (a bit like an Alfred Hitchcock movie). Their brazen character has become very much part of the Durban buzz.

Not long after we arrive at Nino’s the Mynahs begin their cacophony. Just after 5pm they start descending on the trees to roost. Their own darkness cloaks them well and they are barely visible, even when the trees shake with their flapping and pecking and raucous shouting for a space to sleep. It is deafening, and any Durbanite (wherever they are) will immediately recall this sound as I describe it here. 

They fly in, the white on their wings like flitting sparks in the dimming light, and then they leave again to perch on the office block window sills alongside, only to return in a huge flock back to the branches so it seems like some isolated wind rustles and tugs at the dark old tree. 

With the dark Mynahs unseen within it, it is as though the tree itself shudders. We can’t speak at our table, we can’t hear each other, so we watch and take some photos.

The light slowly dims, and high white clouds slowly grow brighter and turn from blazing gold to orange and then faintly pink, and the Mynahs seem to settle, still calling and tugging at their roosting tree.We have an odd but kind, chatty waiter, who informs us that the cooking staff has no idea what a foccacio is, and somehow I don’t care the way I would normally care, but I do point out it’s in the menu and this is an Italian franchised restaurant. Instead of a rant I just smiled weakly and opted for garlic bread (to regret it later). Mandy and I look sceptically at each other as the waiter waxes lyrical about parrots that descend on the same Trichelia housing the roosting Mynah birds. Green parrots, he says, and they stay on the outside of the tree. “Oh, how wonderful,” I say, noticing the condescending tone I take on. “That must be a sight” (too much talking to old people in the hospital ward perhaps?). As our food arrives so do the ‘parrots’. If my thoughts about the waiter’s story of the parrots had been words, I would have been eating them with my pasta. The sky is filled with a flock of birds, fluorescent green and yellow. Their flight and landing is positively parrot-like. They land, true to the waiter’s observations, on the outside of the tree and begin that shuffling-sideways parrot-walk, along the branches, holding onto leaves and twigs with their beaks as they scramble along. 

 

They too fly off and back, giving us a dazzling show of streaking greens across the sky. They are Rosy Ringed Parakeets, and I’ve never seen them like this. The lights in the car lot shine on the parakeets, and it seems as if they glow from inside, like Christmas lights on the dark leafed branches. The Mynahs still shriek together, a grand choir of failed singers, and if they are aware of the parakeets on the outskirts they don’t seem to mind. It all seems strangely dreamlike, and rather bizarre; thinking about my mum who has been part of Durban all of her life, the birds, the odd waiter, all woven together at the heart by a flock of luminous green parakeets.

I looked out across the parking lot to the glaring Caltex sign on the other side. The unpredictability of life tugged at my thoughts, yet I felt a small smile within. There was a spell in the air, a strange ending to a trying day. 

 
This had been a moment, no earth shattering event, nothing that could change anything, yet I will remember that blink of an eye in the day with the Mynahs in the trembling limbs of the aging tree, and the bright green henchman, hanging on the outer twigs. Just another “Durban dazer,” when just about anything can happen… and does.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

p.s. the parakeets also come from India, escaped pets that have bred profusely all over the world including London. Perhaps this is why the Mynahs and Parakeets are such good bedfellows? Here's a link to them with a close up pic. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/getting-to-know-durban-s-little-guests-1.1214995?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot