By Anthony Deyal
(In honour of ‘Bird Day’ which got its name on January 22, 2009, but started in 1979 as the annual ‘Big Garden Bird Watch’ coordinated by the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He’s a mile away and you’ve got his shoes. He who laughs last didn’t get the joke. These clever changes to the ending of well-known proverbs and sayings are a lot of fun. Mark Twain agreed, “Clothes make the man.” Then he added, “Naked people have little or no influence in society.” If you want to change horses, forget about mid-stream. Don’t change them until they stop running. Leave the hot iron aside and strike while the mosquito is close to you.
Also, don’t bite the hand – that looks dirty. One of my favourites gets really good mileage with, “A miss is as good as a Mr.” For teachers online during this COVID time, “You can’t teach an old dog new Math.” For those of us who grew up in the country, “The pen is mightier than the cows or pigs.” You can forget the fire and remember, “Where there’s smoke there’s pollution” and the universal truth, “A penny saved is…not much.” Of course, the best of the lot is, “Better late than pregnant.”
Because my wife Indranie is a bird magnet, I’ve been allowed to have birds in hand, fortunately with her knowledge and blessings but still, I wondered about the saying, “The bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and its origin. I found it in the Bible, Ecclesiastes (6:9) where it is credited to the wisest of ancient rulers, King Solomon. However, as one of the popular though misleading Confucius sayings stresses, “Bird in hand makes it harder to blow nose.” Another version about the poor bird is that with it in hand it is difficult to touch-type. In other words, it makes it impossible for the quick brown fox to jump over the lazy dog. Another wit claims, “A bird in the hand will poop on you” but my experience is that they are not limited to palmistry and are capable of improvisation in any circumstance.
I found that out in Belize where I had to park my new silver Explorer in front of the house under an ancient tree on which a flock of disorderly and discordant crows held a daily confab from dusk to dawn. Their little yellow eyes focused constantly and intently on passers-by while they kept up their unrelenting and continuous demand for sustenance from my wife. Even from those days, she made daily offerings of bread, birdseed and bananas to the many birds around. They washed down their meals with liquid refreshment from a bird-bath which has travelled with us for the past 23 years.
I learnt that the song, “Wings of a Dove” was accurate in its praise of that bird’s prowess in loitering quietly on the side-lines, scrambling some crumbs, and departing hastily pursued by fat, black blimps. I think the blackbird got really upset with us when they heard we were leaving the country (heading to Antigua) and the car was for sale. I am sure I heard one say, “What do you think? Should we put a deposit on it?” The other replied, “I am sure we could get it for a song but let’s put down something more substantial just in case.”
The bird that we never had in hand but totally enjoyed in the bushes, especially the trees surrounding the house, was a giant “keskidee” (known as “the Tyrant Flycatcher”). She was enormously intelligent and was a real noisy tyrant. We were having lunch in the kitchen and she started pecking at the glass skylight in the living room, looking straight at us as if to ask, “Where’s mine?” We decided we would feed her after we fed ourselves. That was neither appreciated nor allowed. The next thing we knew is that she was at the kitchen window next to the dining table hammering it with all the force her beak could muster.
When I thought of what she did, I realised that it took enormous intelligence for her to work out that if she flew round to the back of the house, she would have a closer view of us, and we of her. I remember telling the children that the only bird smarter than that keskidee was a duck that put its head in a river. Why? To liquidate its bill. Then it left abruptly because it was more interested in taking over the bank.
My offbeat one-liners are always useful when the children are ill and need some comfort. Their mother hugs and pampers them (despite their having graduated to more adult underwear) and I make them laugh or at least shake their heads, “Oh dad! Not again.” Why did the turkey cross the road? To prove he was not chicken. Why then did the chicken cross the road? No, not to prove he could talk turkey because he rolled in the mud and crossed the road again. “You give up? He was a dirty-double crosser.” When the chicken soup was ready and I made them sit up in bed and try to have some, I queried, “Why did the chicken end up in the soup pot?” “Because the farmer’s wife told her it was a chicken Jacuzzi.” Then their favourite, “What do you get when you cross a parrot with a shark?” A bird that talks your ear off.
When we moved to Antigua, it was like the bird-telegraph had been working even across the Caribbean Sea. They were all waiting anxiously for us. I thought I saw a large keskidee at the airport but I was certain when it welcomed us to our new home where we lived happily for nine years. For a lot of the time, the land in Antigua is parched by the unrelenting sun, and the birds are forever hungry and thirsty. While the rats can grow fat and strong on left-over dog food, the birds have no choice but to beg for a little help from their friends. We had no problem with them because they were grateful for our assistance unlike the politicians. Actually, the only thing they have in common with those vultures is they, too, are intent on feathering their own nests.
Settling in was difficult initially and I tried to lighten the load of worry on the children by my jokes and quips. Why do hummingbirds hum? Because they can’t remember the words. What bird is always short of breath and out of shape? The Puffin. Why whenever we eat or drink, we have a bird around? It is a Swallow. The only joke I did not tell the children but reserved for a “lime” with some Trini friends at a Stanford cricket event, “There was this woodpecker who was in Antigua for holidays and was pecking at a tree when lightning struck and split the tree in two. The astonished bird said, ‘It is a strange phenomenon that a person does not know how hard his pecker is until he gets away from home’.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen talking about the cartoon character, Tweety Bird. It seems he is suffering from a rare canarial disease called chirpies that is untweetable.
