Birds for Company

I could never get my head around the fascination some English men have for their homing pigeons. Perhaps it is because I’m not restricted for space whereas generally they are, or perhaps keeping caged birds doesn’t tick the boxes for me.

I do share the interest in things avian though, actually, it is more than a passing interest because I have three bird ID books – New Zealand, East Africa and Britain & Europe.

There is a rough area down by the river where I have been working to establish a native shrubbery that will provide a habitat for birds, although that’s not my main motivation – it is just something I like to do because trees are more appealing than gorse and other weeds.

It is hard work for an old fella: the gorse and broom are old, the basal diameter is nearly five inches and the blackberry has stems as thick as my finger, with barbed tendrils five or six yards long!

Ah but the hard work is mitigated by the company of a group of fantails that chase the moths and other insects that fly off whenever I shake the vegetation.

Fantails are one of New Zealand’s most endearing birds because they seem unafraid of people. They are small, light and I could cup one in by hands - but the tail would stick out a bit. The reason they like to be close when people move is that disturbed insects to fly into the air for fantail to opportunistically catch a meal. The fantail’s tail allows them to be nimble flyers, darting about after their prey and you can hear their beak snap shut when they attack.

They are bossy little buggers, if I stop work for a rest, they chatter, ‘cheet, cheet’, trying to encourage me to move around so that the can feed again.

They take unknown risks, having no fear of the roar of the chainsaw, fluttering very close to the cutter bar– near misses are common.

There were six fantails feeding around me, which may infer that their numbers are high, but if there is snow, and because they are insectivorous, they run out of food and perish. Too few insects are active in the cold.

From time to time flocks of the little vacuum cleaners, the waxeyes, [silvereyes or white-eyes, to some] pay a visit. Endemic to East Africa, parts of Australia and the Pacific, they are little omnivorous birds that call to each other and scrap as they skim through the area feeding on aphids, scale insects or mealy bugs. 

I cut the large stems of gorse and broom into firewood - the two species are very good burning.

Stacking it to dry is quite enjoyable because a pair of wood pigeons that are either unafraid of me or enjoy my choice of radio programming.

The New Zealand Wood Pigeon is the largest pigeon on the world! With a distinctive white chest, beady red eyes and red legs - they sit so close I could touch them.

During autumn they feed on fruits and vegetation so are attracted to the tree lucerne (tagasaste) trees that I have planted for them. They are clumsy walkers, especially when they are fat and full, breaking branches yet managing to eat upside down and hopping noisily from branch to branch.

On the other hand they are very good in the air, sometimes swooping upwards to the point of stall, then diving enjoying the use of gravity.

Sometimes when I coo at them, they will coo back and when they feed on cherry plumbs, they use me as a target for the stones!

As I stacked the firewood one of the pair had what looked like seeds of a Clematis stuck to her head, it has been stuck there for a couple of days, which is unusual and I now suspect that it may be feathers disturbed during mating, which again does not tally because it is the wrong time of the year. But anyway something was stuck to her head.

We have large hole-cum-bluff [excavated for road fill] where I tip green waste; branches, weeds and lawn clippings, which is a habitat for slaters [English – woodlice], hoppers and blowfly larvae – a veritable food-bank for blackbirds and thrushes. They work the area systematically and toss the top material downhill in their search for food, thus providing more space in which to dump waste material.

I enjoy the song of both birds but blackbirds annoy because especially the males, have and alarm call that rabbits have learned to recognise, so if I’m hunting a rabbit and cross the path of a blackbird, I might as well give up because the bunnies have been alerted!

I’m lucky, it’s all cheap entertainment!

Grandma Campbell's Gold Heart-shaped Locket

The story continues about the two girls from the south of England who on a fortunate visit to their New Zealand grandparents had found a gold heart-shaped locket in their paddock beside the Waianakarua River.  

The girls enjoyed treasure hunts and wanted to solve the mystery, of how the gold heart-shaped locket ended up in a rabbit burrow down by the river.

The girls felt old fashioned yet cool chugging into town in Granddad’s old truck!  After an ice cream, they visited the town museum and with the help a nice woman, searched the land records, marriage records, and the internet. 

It turned out Grandma Campbell’s maiden name was Jacobi - she and Thomas Campbell travelled out on the same ship in 1895 and both their home places were listed as Gorton, Manchester.

It all fell into place rather neatly.

Back home, for fun, Granddad looked up the Manchester white pages and found three Jacobis listed. The girls wanted to ring all of them straight away, but Granddad counselled that it would be the middle of the night. Instead, he suggested they have another word with old Albert – the girls were keen because he had a fox terrier called Tish and they could play with her.

Granddad told Albert what they had found out and that Grandma Campbell’s maiden name was actually Jacobi. He smiled and said that he had been speaking with his older sister, Edline who knew more.

The whole village worried about Grandma Campbell after she was widowed, and a number of kids went down the hill to visit or help her. There was one girl who was especially attached to her though and she was Lizzie Morrison. Lizzie never married and worked in the Pacific Islands for years – school teaching or nursing. She retired to Oamaru and is now in a rest home overlooking the harbour. She is very crippled up, but still sharp as a tack at the age of 93. She had always kept in touch with Zeke Jacobi, Grandma Campbell’s younger brother. 

The girls wanted to visit Lizzie Morrison, but Granddad and Granny weren’t so sure, rest homes can be intimidating for children, but after a short family conference it was decided that they should go to visit Lizzie.

Granddad and the girls were shown into Lizzie’s room, which was actually quite nice and not at all smelly - Lizzie was pleased to see the girls. She asked them who they were and the girls replied nicely to her.

Granddad told Lizzie that that they were interested to talk about Grandma Campbell and that the girls had found an artefact that might have belonged to her.

Shyly, the oldest girl placed the gold heart-shaped locket and chain in Lizzie’s hand. She looked at it, and ran then the chain through her fingers. Tears filled her eyes and down her cheeks.

The girls feared for a moment that they had done something wrong.

When Lizzie composed herself, she said that when she was about ten years old, she had lost the gold heart-shaped locket and chain while taking Polly the cow to the river for a drink. The loss has nagged at her all her life! And yes, it belonged to Grandma Campbell.

The gold heart-shaped locket and chain was made by her father, who was a goldsmith in Gorton, Manchester, and was the only link Grandma Campbell had with her family – she was distraught when it was lost.

Granddad asked what Lizzie thought was appropriate to do with the gold heart-shaped locket and chain.

Her reply was to just keep it, but then reconsidered. Zeke’s granddaughter, Mary, looks after him and sends a Christmas card each year. If she could only see the locket – hold it. Lizzie smiled at the thought.

The assurance was given that Mary would get to hold the golden heart-shaped locket and that Granddad would keep in touch with Lizzie - she was pleased.

When fortune smiles, things fall into place! The girls regularly travel north with their parents, usually bypassing Manchester, but as per arrangement, the day came that they were to visit Mary and her grandfather, Zeke.

Mary answered the door and told the visitors that Lizzie had been in touch. Nobody could believe about the girl’s find. Zeke too was delighted to meet them and was excited about the gold heart-shaped locket. The girls had packed it in a pretty box.

Zeke asked Mary to hand him a small box from the mantel and presented it to the girls. Inside there were two replicas of the gold heart-shaped locket – with each girl’s initials engraved on it. The Jacobi family still work with gold, and Zeke’s father had kept the pattern!

Mary would treasure her gold heart-shaped locket!

Good came from good.

Maturity?

It you take the signing of the country’s founding document as a starting date, then we are 175 years old as a nation! With nowhere near the history of our European colonisers we still struggle a little for identity and there are many who do not align with sheep or rugby, racing and beer as a perceived image. We are even spending a fortune to figure out if we need a new flag or not!

We have matured though! No longer is it X Factor: All-other-parts-of-the-world, we have our very own X Factor: NZ! With a population a few over 4 million, it is difficult to escape what goes on in the reality programme, which is little more than an upmarket version of karaoke.

Most of the snippets I have seen are about the humiliation of the not-so-gifted triers by judges who play up to a television audience that likes to laugh at someone make a fool of him/herself and being humiliated.

The news media, radio talkback and social media went berserk when a couple of the judges of this year’s lot went too far with the humiliation thing. Bowing to public pressure the humiliation became ‘bullying’, and the judges were sacked. Isn’t ‘bullying’ a more appropriate term for ‘humiliation’? Though in the reality television world, maybe they are paid to be humiliated – who knows or cares?

Then there was the other biggie in the news.

This married couple went out to a restaurant to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The wife was heavily pregnant and the waitress, after conferring with her boss, refused to serve the mum-to-be a glass of champagne.

There was the faction that believe it is the woman’s right to put into her body whatever she wants (as long as it’s legal) and there were bullying words levelled at the waitress. This was the topic for two days on radio talkback!

There was the faction, much in the minority that thought while well-meaning, the waitress was there to serve and that’s what she should have done. (Equates to an unthinking waitress.)

Some bar owners thought they had a right to refuse to serve, while others disagreed.

Then there were both sides of the related debate, one saying even a single drink could be harmful to a foetus, and the other saying moderate drinking causes no harm to a foetus. Experts of both sides called and no consensus was reached – you would think there would be something definitive about a thing like that, eh?

The thing is though, how did all this talk effect the young woman had been waiting on the tables? Nobody seems to care about her, or how she felt with all this talk focusing on around her.

Serving the pregnant woman obviously pricked at the waitress’ conscience and by not serving the mum-to-be at least she knew definitively that she did not contribute to the harm of a foetus – I can live with that.

The underlying issue, it seemed to me, was that most of the public do not like restrictions to be put on their right to consume booze – that’s where the bullying and arrogance came from.

Anyway, wedding anniversaries are a celebration, but in the end, just another day – I have had nearly fifty of them, so have a fair idea – but to elevate the occasion to a must-have-a-drink? Most of the bullies said being refused a drink would see them walk out of the restaurant! Their right of course, but a bit petty.

The piece de resistance is that we have matured to two home-grown reality programmes. We now have Bachelor: NZ!  (Retch inducing for anyone over 30!)

The world-wide news is that one of the contestants farted while in some romantic spot with the hunk!

Ah yes, maturing as a nation – or just growing pains?

Grandma Campbell's Gold

Widow, Grandma Campbell lived half way up Finlayson’s Road in the small slabwood house that she had helped her husband build when they first arrived in Otepopo circa 1901.  Her only company was a black cat, Elijah and her house-cow, Polly. Except that is for the weekend and school-off-days when Elizabeth came to stay with her.

Elizabeth’s family lived in the township and because times were tough, they had difficulty making ends meet, so the arrangement was that the ten year old girl would stay with the widow whenever she could, mainly for company, and also to partake in Grandma Campbell’s farm-grown vittles. The pair became great friends despite their age gap.

The one special thing that Elizabeth liked above all else was being allowed to wear the old woman’s gold heart-shaped locket and chain. It seemed to glow on her skin and she felt rich with it around her neck.

North Otago has always been drought-prone and the drought of 1932 was particularly severe for Grandma Campbell because the small creek, Jimmy’s Creek she called it, close to the house had dried up and the tank for collected rainfall from her roof was also bone dry!

It too her about two hours to take Polly down to the main road, down the hill to the railway line where there were gates to provide access across the line. The main road had not yet been tarred so there was never much traffic - it was common for livestock to be driven along the road. She crossed the narrower road that led to Frame’s Crossing, passed through another gate into a narrow paddock where there was a rough animal track that meandered down the steep bank to the river where the cow took her fill.

Grandma Campbell made this trek every second day, even though it was hard on her elderly frame. It was a Godsend and she was grateful to Elizabeth when she was visiting and she took Polly down to the river, allowing the elderly woman to rest.

One fateful day, when Elizabeth returned from watering Polly, she realized that she had lost the gold heart-shaped locket that Grandma Campbell had fastened around her neck. Elizabeth and Grandma Campbell were heartbroken! She had explained that the chain and locket was a fifth birthday gift from her mother and inside was a small lock of her five year old hair.

They spent days retracing Elizabeth’s steps, with each day ending in tears for Elizabeth! Kind Grandma Campbell, immensely sad at her loss, but never blaming the child.

Eighty three years on, by the miracle of modern transport and considerable fortune, two girls from England were visiting their grandparents whose home sat perched on a river flat above the Waianakarua River. The girls were curious of their new surroundings and ventured down the steep bank to look for rabbits on the flat beside the river and to wonder at their apparent loneliness and freedom.

Hoping to see some baby rabbits they stopped where a burrow was partly excavated and peeped down the hole. One of them disturbed the heap of soil that the rabbit had scratched out.

There glinting the sunlight was a piece of gold chain! The elder of the pair took possession of the chain with the attached heart-shaped locket and they ran back to the house to show off their find.

After the excitement and dreams of riches had died down, Granddad cleaned the gold heart-shaped locket and opened it to reveal that a lock of hair was intact and there were initials - MJ on the outside of the locket.

The girls were full of questions and Granddad had no answers, but the youngest granddaughter thought they should try to find the owner to give it back – because she might be sad.

Granddad explained that the gold heart-shaped locket and chain was probably very old, but because he had prepared many a treasure hunt for them, he thought they could try to follow the clues to find out more. He did have an idea so took the girls up to the township to talk to an old identity, Albert, who he knew well. Granddad asked if he could remember Grandma Campbell’s maiden name. Straight off Albert remembered her Christian name, Mary, because he too, as Granddad remembered hearing, had taken turns to water Polly the cow down at the river. Remembering the maiden name was more of a stretch, Jacob maybe, he thought, but not exactly Jacob.

M.J. matched the initials on the locket so Granddad reckoned they were on the right track at least and the girls were still keen to solve the mystery of the ownership of Grandma Campbell’s gold.

The treasure hunt will continue.