Page 35 - INTRA MUROS December 2020

HUMOUR

Ha-ha-hadeda

By James Clarke

The infernal, strident, sleep- for more eye of newt and tongue of bat. earth using its tube-like bill for skewering
shattering call of that pesky Its call is as divorced from bird song as earthworms and insects. This is the only
bird, the hadeda, has become a a jackhammer’s rattle is divorced from time it shuts up - when its bill is deep into
Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.
the dirt.
characteristic of life in suburban
Johannesburg - like crime and deep There are times when I wonder if The proliferation of exotic trees in urban
holes in the road. the hadeda is not being deliberately areas has offered it new nesting and
provocative. I recall a row of them sitting roosting opportunities and, in the evening,
on next door’s roof and calling loudly it never roosts until it has joined the gang
f the hadeda’s racket were man-made, at 4pm on an otherwise quiet Sunday for a final hideous sunset chorus.
it would surely be outlawed. From a
Itechnical perspective it is well above afternoon. At first, being a tolerant sort of
the decibel level that the National person, I chuckled at the effrontery of it. It What can we do about it? There is an
Occupational Safety Association would really was over the top, even for hadedas. option.
It was the sort of racket you’d expect from
recommend even on a panel-beater’s shop frustrated drunken soccer fans after their We will have to, en mass, evacuate Gauteng
floor.
team had lost 10 - 0 at home. for a few years allowing tall veld grasses to
This misbegotten bird awakens tens of take over and the ground to harden. Tall
thousands every dawn. Which is fine I Then suddenly my neighbour, the trees will have to be chopped down.
archetype of a quiet, cultured suburban
suppose unless, say, you’d had a late night lady, came out of her kitchen and shouted But then (I hear you ask) where do we go?
and wanted to sleep in a bit.
at the top of her lungs,“ For Pete’s sake
I am not averse to be woken by birds shutuppp!” We go west – west into the Great Karoo
– small singing birds. In fact it is just as They flew off, jeering. Hadedas can be very and to the Namib. Yet even there we
will not be assured of peace because,
pleasant as being woken by soft music. But derisive. according to the Atlas of Southern African
why can’t the hadeda be more sensitive?
Birds published by Birdlife South Africa,
Until the sudden urban influx of Bostrychia The hadeda is an urban squatter. In recent the hadeda is steadily moving into the
hagedash (the formal name for the hadeda years it has hugely expanded its numbers arid west lured by irrigation schemes and
having learned to nest on telegraph poles.
in the summer rainfall area such as the
ibis) around the 1980s, it was the bulbul’s Highveld, especially in suburban areas.
ever-cheerful song that woke us in the It’s not as if it cannot find work in the rural The poles will have to go to of course.
mornings, or the robin’s melodious voice
whose singing could even lull us back to areas where it properly belongs. The influx And the irrigation schemes.
sleep if we so desired. came about because of the expansion of
suburbia with its watered gardens. They Or one could migrate, overseas.
give the hadeda the opportunity, all year
While most birds chirp merrily, the hadeda round, to probe the Highveld’s now softer
screams like an impatient witch shrieking

INTRA MUROS DECEMBER 2020 33