Page 32 - aug20

Blue Butterfly -gardening isn’t just for the birds

Lockdown … the new catchword that has
people all over the world hustling to buy extra
hand sanitizer and toilet paper … and so we
closed our businesses, we sent our staff home,

we confined ourselves to house and hearth and
attempted to get on with our lives under the
‘new normal’ of social distancing and
restrictive movement permits.
Photo by Lee Ouzman
My husband and I decided to split the household tasks and I selflessly volunteered to work in
the garden … using the lockdown period to catch up on garden and nursery tasks. Usually most
of these tasks would be performed in a permanent rush to the background sounds of ringing
phones, talking staff, traffic noises, alarms, airplanes, distant bar music and the general detritus of
modern life ... but now peace and quiet had descended on our neighbourhood, the likes of which
we haven’t experienced in years. It became a time of hard work and sweat, of contemplation and
planning, of talking and singing badly to my dogs and trees and plants and reviving the joy and
satisfaction of the work in hand … and in all that quiet time I also rediscovered the delight of
listening to all my old familiar birds in the garden. It was also a timely reminder that
“gardening is not just about creating a pleasant environment but about creating
and rehabilitating a living ecosystem to benefit all its diverse residents.”

It was my mother, back in the last century, that first planted the seeds of my current love for
birds. She took her children hiking and camping in remote areas, gradually and patiently teaching
her noisy offspring to appreciate the significance of nature and the value of listening to its subtle
charms. Armed with my father’s ancient binoculars and a bird book she taught herself, and us
by some weird process of parental osmosis, to identify birds by sight and more importantly, by
sound. The introduction of modern bird ‘Apps’ has made identifying birds by the variety of calls
they make increasingly easier than trying to match a call to a written description, something that
we found hilariously entertaining as children. My husband has loaded a number of these bird
‘Apps’ on my mobile phone over the last few years and it has become a personal challenge to
enhance and apply these listening skills to identify our local birds.

And so, in lockdown solitude, as I dug over the compost heaps, I listened to the Terrestrial
Brownbuls and Yellow-bellied Greenbuls bickering in the leaf mould and the Meve’s Starlings
yelling at the Bush Babies and the Red-billed Oxpeckers who’ve appropriated the best tree hollows
for nests. As I prepared and planted the vegetable and herb gardens, I listened to the Lesser
Honeyguide chasing the Black-backed Puffbacks and the White-crested Helmet- Shrikes who
dared to fly into the leadwood trees, I heard the surprisingly sweet calls of the Grey Hornbills and
the eerie cries of the Bennett’s Woodpeckers as they took a break from tapping the tree trunks.
As I cut the grass I flushed the lost Black Crake from the bushes at the pool pump, followed
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