The agapanthus begins to unfold its buds.A pigeon has taken up part-time residence in a nest in the wisteria over the front door. It does not spend much time there and there is no evidence of eggs or nestlings, though there was quite a fuss in the building of the nest - twigs and feathers scattered on the front doorstep. We see it sometimes sitting on the roof opposite before taking off for the wisteria into which it disappears.It just seems to be a convenient place to take a rest. As I cross the road to go the vegetable garden, I look a back at the house, and see the big patch of green beside and above the front door, and realize how the pigeon must see it as an attractive place to take refuge. It is not the first bird to nest there. For several years in succession blackbirds preceded it and produced young, which fledged interestingly enough. on two occasions, during the mens' final and Wimbledon.
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I peer though the hedge of the house where a raucous parrot lives. Because of the warm weather its cage is in the garden. It has many human voices, often repeating the words "hullo" in a range of tones from falsetto to a husky contralto. Today, as it rattles at the bars of its cage, it is laughing, not a discrete intellectual laugh, rather a bawdy laugh, a spiteful laugh. On the lawn beside the cage is a crow, not in the least disturbed by the din, though it may well itself be its object. Eventually the crow flies off, nonchalantly and perhaps not entirely aware of the extent of its freedom.
4 comments:
I have given up trying to understand what crows think, although I do believe that they are blessed with thought.
:)
How fascinating is the voice of the parrot! Even a crow, for I remember one in the Winnipeg Zoo who kept saying 'hot dog, hot dog'!
Seeing your lovely agapanthus makes me sad that I lost mine to our past harsh winter.
Your parrot reminds me of the forgotten (?) whodunnit writer Edmund Crispin (in real life the composer Bruce Montgomery) who wrote round the Eng.lit. don, Gervase Fen. Animals figure as leitmotifs in several of his novels. In one there is the "non-doing pig" and in another a parrot in a pub which has wrenched out all its feathers from the neck down and which sings Die Lorelei from chapter to chapter. The final chapter ends, rather movingly, with the final words "... und hat ich mit ihren Singen die Lorelei getan."
C: I can only think that this crow was thinking, I've no time for that idiot parrot.
M-L: Out agapanthus only just survived the winter, producimg just three bloom in contrast with the 18 last year.
BB: I remember Edmund Crispin and Gervase Fen, but not the parrot. Parrots may sometimes be funny superficially but there is an undelying sadness about the creatures. Perhaps because they are so out of place in cages and yet seem to have accepted the constraints imposed on them. Their immitative calls seem to be a commentary on their condition. The Crispin parrot's singing illustrates this well.
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