Bird friends

I've written this a long time ago, maybe my 4th or 5th post-to-be, but I've never been able to publish it, only today. Read on ...


There's these two maya birds outside my room window. They're on the window sill opposite the building I'm in, and since no one lives in that other building, nobody goes there to clean up or do any maintenance. I think those two birds have been there since before November, if I'm not mistaken, and it seems like they're here to stay. They are marvelously precise. I've been checking up on them (like they were people) and they never fail to nest at 6:14pm on my watch. Just about the time the sky turns dark orange during sunset and it's dark enough for them to feel secure "going home". In the morning, while I type my journal entries, they leave their nest at precisely 6:14am. Biologists would call this a circadian rhythm. All living things follow it or experience it, like you and me. It's all the events that happen to an organism within 24 hours and the observable patterns that form from observing succeeding 24-hour cycles.

In my case, I eat, sleep, go online, talk on the phone, run some errands, and sleep. In a nutshell that is.

In the case of the birds, they leave their home at 6:14 in the morning. I have no idea what they do for the 12 hours during the day. They probably go find food or join other birds at "work" or merely chirp each other songs to get the day by. Afterwhich they return to their nest at 6:14pm on the dot, and start sleeping through the night. If you check the window sill, it's already collecting loads of oxidized maya droppings forming a trickling pattern of white residue from the sill down to the bottom of the wall. The weird thing is, there are no "homy touches" to their tiny nook, no sign that they consider that part of the building their house. On the same building, I observed up on the 3rd floor, there's an old air-conditioner without it's metal casing, so much so that you can see the "innards" of the mechanism. A family of maya birds have been living in it for quite some time now, and you can see that the cavities are lined with little mounds of grass and soil. I bet they've even laid and hatched fledglings there. But with the one opposite my window, there seems to be no trace of "settling down." Which brings me to a conclusion formulated about 3 days now ... the birds opposite my window are having an elicit affair. That's the only plausible explanation I have. They only meet up precisely at 6:14pm and leave as early as 6:14am. What they do on that window sill within the 12 hours they're together is probably a secret from all the other birds. And who knows, maybe during the nights when I'm burning the midnight oil, it is likely that they do their little bird dance and other maya mating rituals that I'm not aware of. If so, how come they don't have children yet? Is there some sort of natural avian birth control method? Are maya birds firm believers in safe sex? Or are they merely barren?

Whatever the ethological reasons there are, I probably won't know or understand at this point. But somehow I'm glad they're beside my window. I don't feel so alone when I work at night.

Damn. Those birds lead more interesting lives.



NOTE: The birds have since been gone after the cold months. They were replaced by the aircon that used to be in my room, only now I have a newer air-conditioner in my room. It's all just crap over there.