Weaving his magic - you won’t believe how this feathered Romeo wooed a Juliet

It was during Daily Maverick’s weekly editorial meeting that I noticed something flittering in the corner of my eye. Yellow and black, it wove mid-air through the soft, long grass in front of my stoep (veranda) in Hoedspruit near Kruger National Park.

When the meeting wrapped and my colleagues blipped off my screen like a patchwork chequerboard, I realised the voyager was a new arrival. It was a southern-masked weaver powered by whirruping wings, carrying apple-green blades of grass to the far side of the stoep.

His face wrapped in black like the bushveld pimpernel, this golden flying bullet had begun building his nest. Back and forth he went, surgically extracting grass, swiftly threading each blade into a frame. It was the makings of a tiny new home for a lady weaver.

And so it was that the real estate developer became known as “Hoedini” — for the American escapologist who flew across Australia and dangled from skyscrapers.

Hoedini built his showhouse in hours, often upside down, claws holding fast to a hairline branch. Next, he perched on the showhouse roof and announced himself with the confidence of a zero-sum novel wooer.

“Guys, I’m going to be a grandma!” I texted friends, picturing bushveld-blue mornings as Hoedini’s wife and kids graced my stoep with all the theatre of fledging a family. At night we’d all turn in at the same time, and I’d think of them dozing softly in their little nest.

As the seasons changed and the pages of my life leafed over to new chapters, I’d gaze out the window like a war-novel heroine — awaiting the arrival of each spring to watch Hoedini’s line sire a new generation.

“I just assisted the matchmaking by refilling his jacuzzi (bird bath) with fresh, cool water. I need him to have every chance of success, I want grand chicks soon!”

The response was deadpan.

“Brave yourself for quite an ordeal. Weaver chicks are mal. Poor dude might go mad. Destroy his home and try again.”

Oh.

My friends weren’t off-piste. Hoedini was a master craftsman that also revealed himself to be — and there is no other way of saying this — crap at wooing babes.

It’s not like he didn’t try. He pirouetted upside down from the wooing tree — a buffalo thorn — flapping with near-pornographic fervour. He shot to the wooing tree’s crown, Pavarottying out his little weaver heart. He floofed his tail feathers. Arrow-straight wings aquiver, he tangoed along the nesting branch like a matador. The branch was his tightrope; in his mind, the chicks were going nuts in the neighbouring tree.

Hoedini was Hoedspruit’s answer to Cirque du Soleil.

After the kingfishers kicked off the dawn chorus, Hoedini was the first out, pimping out his nest with more padding than any branchlet could hold. After the sun had slipped off, and self-respecting birds had turned in, Hoedini was still out there, defending his territory against imagined intruders and singing his song to the beasties of the night.

He was, I thought, perhaps trying too hard.

“I’m totally going to lure a weaver babe and give her no time to inspect the nest,” said no smooth weaver, ever. “I’ll shoot back to the door and block all of it with a frontier-bro, wing-flapping display while she’s still in the nest.”

The weaver girls came, they saw … and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

For all his feathering-do, my adopted avian kid was a callow dork that ignored all parental tips I beamed his way.

At some point I found myself getting genuinely irritated. Hoedini, desperate, was now ripping leaves off my buffalo thorn like a frontier bro without frontiers.

Whole branches were left bare. All he had to do was roar like a mating lion.

“Chirrup-chirrup-chirrup. Tick-tick-bubble-bubble,” he purred the moment a girl alighted nearby. Anyone would now surely do.

The saga endured five days. Had anyone, I thought, ever sought therapy for incessant exposure to a weaver’s quest for happily ever right now?

“I stopped watching weavers a few years back. The affair that unfolds breaks my heart and leaves me with very ill feelings towards the females,” confessed a friend from Birdwatchers Anonymous. “That is a polite way of saying weaver chicks are b****** that only accept perfection.”

Returning home after lunch on day five, I noticed a hush had settled over the bush. The grass, otherwise postcard-green after all the rains, seemed blanched white-hot in the heat.

Hoedini’s nest had vanished mid-air.

In the long grass below the wooing tree, there was no forensic trail.

No twig. No trace of nest insulation.

A dove crooned. A cicada whirred. Hoedini’s unmistakeable chirps were silent.

He was gone.

That afternoon, as the sun cast mournful, deep-yellow slats across the stoep, the wooing tree began to sing by itself.

“Chirrup-chirrup-chirrup. Tick-tick-bubble-bubble. Kiht-kiht-kiht. Zrrrr-zrrr-zrrr-zwwwheeerrr.”

It seemed impossible, but Hoedini was back up there, defending his estate even if now it was a wooing tree without a nest.

Hoedini was a dork. But he was my petite hero. He was not going to give up.

Southern-masked weavers have catholic tastes. They live everywhere: savannah, scrub, woodland, rural gardens, urban gardens.

They’re the opposite of threatened. (That’s because they do actually know how to get it on.)

And yet, watching Hoedini loop the first string into his love offering, beak-weaving it without being shown how, was an unbearably tender tribute to the highs and lows of one bird’s life.

Birds can seem so very human … and we? We can seem so very bird-like.

Hoedini, it turns out, would build another nest after destroying edition one.

Babes came. Babes went. But he seemed less invested now.

During one weird moment, he took a break. A rare one. For 20 long, agonising minutes, he just sat there in the sickle bush, staring at nothing. He wasn’t even preening himself.

After one more “zrrrr-zrrr-zrrr-zwwwuuuuuheeerrr” atop the wooing tree, he whirruped off.

The nest has now browned, days have passed.

His never-chosen bachelor pad hovers wistfully in the breeze.

I have not seen him again.

“Maybe he’s suffering from depression,” a colleague quipped.

Or maybe he hit the jackpot.

One morning, a male southern-masked weaver flew in from the far side of the greenbelt in a swift, intentional line towards the bird bath.

It was as though he had mapped the water’s secluded spot among a cluster of acacias.

This was a weaver that already knew where the water was.

Lowveld light twinkled in the drops churned up by his splattering flight feathers. He splashed, then he flashed off with purpose, clearly busy with some very important assignment.

I have no way of confirming it was Hoedini. I couldn’t imagine it was anyone else. DM