Are birds a gateway drug to something nefarious, like a sliver of happiness?

As with most good stories, even this one os­­tensibly about birds, we start with a dog. Not just any dog. My best friend, Ripley. Yes, I know I should probably have a human best friend but, alas, I don’t. I have a few good friends, but none I’d describe as a bestie.

Ripley was that one exceptional friend and when we had to put her down last year, the pain of her death was like a black hole that threatened to pull all life and light into it, including me.

I can’t explain why it hurt so much, but it did and I felt myself teetering on the edge of that black hole until a friend who could see that I was struggling said: “You will find a way to grow around the hole, because it’s always going to be there.”

I’m not entirely sure why, but that made sense to me, and it was coming from someone who had been there, done that, so it didn’t feel like the occasionally in­sincere comments we’re all guilty of making when someone is grieving.

Pre-dawn noise

Ripley died in April last year and it was about a month before her death that we both noticed a particularly annoying bird singing very loudly before dawn. Ripley hated waking up early as much as I did, so we would both stir restlessly when our sleep was broken by what was, back then, an annoying noise from a feathered fiend. A month later, in the midst of the darkness of her death, this bird invaded my life in a way that seemed otherworldly.

At that point, birds had never been more than an annoyance. Pigeons seemed to hound our old Labrador retriever, Xena, incessantly when she was alive and she killed many of them. In fact, all our dogs killed quite a few pigeons over the years. There was one particularly gruesome murder scene in our back yard about 10 years ago when two of our dogs had torn a pigeon apart into nearly perfect halves and my sister and I had to clean up the mess.

Then there were the African Hoopoes and Common Mynas trying to make their way into the roof, and the Hadeda Ibises constantly poop­­ing near the pool from which they quenched their thirst. As I said, all constant, if minor, annoyances.

No ordinary bird

I struggled to sleep after Ripley’s death and one morning, when the darkness of pre-dawn was broken by a song from one of the neighbour’s trees, I listened, and that’s something I hadn’t done before.

Almost immediately, I was entranced. This was no ordinary bird. It was singing an entire song. It had a range of notes in its repertoire. It wasn’t chirping, or tweeting, it was singing, and while I know that birds sing for myriad reasons, it seemed this one was singing on its own, in the darkness, for the sheer joy of singing.

The cynical part of me said, “Bloody twerp, shut up!” Another part of me said: “Geez, that’s achingly beautiful.”

It was a Cape robin-chat, a gorgeous bird with the most impressive singing voice in Joburg’s northern ’burbs and it quickly filled up my life and gave me a reason to be curious, joyful and silly again.

It sat on the deck, outside my bedroom and sang; it flew through the kitchen into the dining room one day and then struggled to find its way out; and it sat in the neighbour’s tree every morning before dawn belting out its greatest hits.

The Jean-Claude van Damme of birds

And for no reason that I can fathom, all the garden birds started intruding on my time, and my life. There was the Jean-Claude van Damme of birds – a Speckled mousebird – doing the splits while eating the purple cabbage we’d planted and forgotten about. There was the Southern masked weaver tearing apart a nest he’d stupidly built on the precarious tip of a palm frond. And there was the sombre Hadeda who sat alone on the neighbour’s roof in the middle of a storm while the rain seemed to batter its body and its spirit.

And, of course, there was the Cape robin-chat, who would often sit on the fence 3m away from my bedroom window and look straight at me, then cock its head to the side as if it was a confused dog trying to figure something out.

I told a friend living in Ireland about the robin-chat and she told me that the Irish believe that robins carry messages from recently deceased loved ones who are trying to say that they’re okay. This particular friend and I are quite cynical and yet, for some bizarre reason, we both believed what she was saying.

A gateway drug

That Cape robin-chat is now a friend and I smile every time I see her. I don’t know for sure if it’s a female – it’s just a feeling. When I water the garden in the early evening, she swoops in to sit on a tree nearby and sings. When I drop a few dried worms outside my bedroom window, I rustle the bag and a few minutes later I get to watch her gobbling up the tasty snack. And when I wake up at 5.15am to get ready for gym when everyone else is still asleep, I no longer feel quite so alone because her cheerful music is there to keep me company in the cold darkness of a Joburg winter morning.

As I was driving to gym and greeting all the birds along the way one morning, I realised that birds, and the natural world, might just be a gateway drug to something completely nefarious, because it’s so hyped up and yet so elusive: a sliver of happiness.

My phone is now filled with sounds, photos and rather terrible videos of birds. (I have an older iPhone and the cameras on older iPhones are god-awful.)

I joined the Wits Bird Club (WBC) and did an illuminating basic birding course with them at BirdLife South Africa. And I now spend a good amount of my free time with other bird nerds from WBC going on long, slow walks to spot the wondrous variety of birds in and around Joburg as we learn how to help our garden birds thrive while also contributing to local and global citizen science initiatives aimed at conservation.

I’m just a novice birder and I’m certain that everyone in the WBC knows more about birds than I do. I don’t have the most impressive binoculars, and I’m only starting to read my first bird book.

And yet, despite my introvert and perfectionist parts telling me to stay at home because I’m no ornithologist, I still find myself going on bird walks every so often. I do so because birders tend to be nice people, I’m learning a lot from them, I’m spending time in nature and it’s just simple, uncomplicated fun that doesn’t involve social media or AI or big tech.

Never mind nefarious, birds are clearly diabolical. DM