Ode to Birds, Sort Of.

The birds all look like they could be in Disney’s Snow White – and no, I do not know their names. There is one bright yellow bird, with puffy cheeks and a funny bird call. It’s everywhere, and yesterday I walked by its village. A tree on the corner between two roads was filled with almost perfectly circular balls of twigs hanging down from singular tiny twigs that connected them to the branches of the tree. There were about fifty such cylinders. The yellow birds where coming in and out of their little tree commune. It seemed very organized.

There is one bird, I am not sure which, that sounds like the sound you hear from Skype when you get a message, or like some cell-phone text message sing-songy beeps – or, someone pointed out, cell phones and Skype sound like the birds. They sound very artificial, and I am slowly learning that, in fact, those sounds are not artificial, but found in nature, designed into technology in areas where nature’s sort of thinning out. There is a sound that also sounds like a motor – I am not sure if it is from a frog or a bird. The motor combined with the birds that have shorter beeps sounds exactly like a pickup truck backing out. Some have this fantastic talent of throwing their musical bird beeps so that they echo. I would say it was beautiful, but it really does sound a little like techno computer-generated synthetic sounds. Which I was never a big fan of. But it definitely is cool. And maybe there is an evolutionary adaptation to liking these sorts of funny techno-sounding bird sounds which can explain why techno and trans music are so popular among humanity and really seedy clubs. Maybe these sounds are an indication that there is plentiful food and water, and so now’s a good time to procreate? Or something.

There is one black-and-white bird with a ridiculously long tail – really, it’s absurd – and it flies around really awkwardly, bouncing as it flies because its tail keeps on taking it down a notch, and you really see it struggling to keep himself up. I was told by another volunteer that this tail’s sole purpose is mate selection for the females. The tail may also be a sign for the other females that it has other hidden useful traits, because you fly like that, you’ve got to have some other hidden talent to stay alive.

Speaking of little creatures - a little girl, maybe three or four, was holding her baby sibling, maybe one or two. In the moment of excitement that a white person was walking by, excitement perhaps multiplied by the other children and adults who saw me, she waved to me with the hand holding the baby bi-accident, and down went the baby, which cried a lot but seemed ok. The baby didn’t have a long way down to go, being almost the same size as its holder. I have always read that, in traditional societies on an almost universal level, mothers do not directly take care of children much after two or three, but give them to older children to take care of. This has always made me very happy, because it breaks the stereotype as women caring for their children until adulthood of even teenagehood which seems to be a more modern phenomenon. It is interesting seeing the whole give-the-toddler-over-to-older-children phenomenon in practice, though in Jerusalem, with very large Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jewish families and religious Muslim families, you see this quite a lot as well.