Bread, Butter, Breakfast, Binoculars, Book, Bifocals, Birds, Balcony

Boy, Henry... he really can do you!

 

... do what they do, Lenny"

 

Chinese Pond Heron checks out our koi carp

Winners of Hong Kong photo contest 2023

 

At back: ICC, 108 floors. IFC, 88 floors. More winners here

The above is shot from high on Hong Kong island, looking across the harbour to the ICC building in Kowloon West. The IFC is in Central. 

The bird is (most likely) a Black-eared Kite 

The first Koel of 2024

Male Koel feeds female 

Sounded his Kooo-el, this morning, according to Arlene. This seems now to be pretty much the usual time, end January to early February arrival. June or July departure. 

Earlier years, Search “Koel” on the right side. 

“Hoopoe flying south stops in Hong Kong urban park and draws flock of admirers” | SCMP

As Israel is in the news, its national bird makes a stop here in Hong Kong on its migratory route....

Bird song and dance

First, let’s align ourselves.

We’re on Lantau island to the west of Hong Kong island, still part of the territory. Part of the the Other system of the One country.

Our house, seen from a drone, is a thick “I”. Aligned north and south. To our East is Hong Kong Island the South China Sea, the Philippines, the Pacific Ocean, British Columbia, California. To our North and West is China. The Mainland. Our mother. Our sovereign. 

I’m sitting in our lounge listening to Jing play Chopin on her beautiful  Bösendorfer Grand.

I hear a cacophony of birds next door. Sounds like they’re delighting in life, chirruping their love of our dear planet.

I wait for a break in Jing’s practice, and say “listen to the birds having a wow of a time”. 

We go out to watch and listen. We see they’re fighting, not dancing. They’re squabbling over something terribly important to them. Their whole life and focus taken up with squawking and spitting and shrilling as they do.

And it makes me think how we all are in our bubbles. We humans and our deep-dish haggles, births, marriages, elections and wars. We think them all so important. 

We think during the battle that that’s all there is to the world. That’s all there is to life. But we’re just like the birds. Obsessed. Yelling, screaming, for our rights. For me. For me. Squawking and Skittering. 

Birds

Birds love cheese

I’m in the kitchen, prepping my latest Osso Buco, cutting the mould off some blue cheese and eating the good bits. I throw the mouldy bits out on our kitchen garden for whoever. And it’s birds! They zoom in like Hitchcock’s Birds. Birds fluttering everywhere. 

I eat anything that’s not rotten. Out of date? Smell it and eat it. Drop on floor? Pick it and eat it. That’s kept me healthy. I’m too fat. Sure. But healthy, as in not sick? Sure. 

Stuff in the pantry that’s out of date? I don’t throw it. I open and smell it. Taste. If it smells ok and tastes ok, then it’s ok. That’s it. “Use by dates” are a nonsense.

I recall my essay of whether or not we should feed birds. Here it is. Short answer is: yeah, sure, feed birds. 

With the cheese: the birds were so keen they didn’t budge when I came out with some more. They were so keen, they froze in place. Where’s my cheese? Who moved my cheese?

We’ve had so many dogs, and I say from observation: there’s not a dog in the world who doesn’t love cheese. Cheese. The bread of life.

It’s such a lovely day!

I’m sitting here on a bench by the Promenade along the seafront of our Siena Park in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. I’m in the middle of my daily bike ride around these forty acres. It’s 21 degrees C and just 55% humidity, dry for us.

I’m looking due East, toward Victoria Harbour — yes, it’s still called “Victoria”, bless Beijing — and past the harbour, past the Peak, past Central, past Kowloon, to the South China Sea. I think of the history this harbour has seen. Stolen by the Brits in the Opium Wars, wars fought to keep Chinese addicted. Taken by the Royal Navy as the only deep water port along this East China coast. Wondering why the Chinese had ignored deep water for so long and thinking  must have done so because their boats were shallow draft junks and sampans. Coastal vessels. Didn’t need deep water. The British had ocean-going craft with much deeper draft. So they were obsessed with deep water. Is that the reason?

A fresh easterly is blowing, off that South China Sea, brushing by Hong Kong island, bringing us clear air, fresh, clean, Covid-free.

People wander by at a regular clip, not a swarm but a regular pass-by, doing what Italians call a passeggiata. Walking. Wandering. Strolling. Enjoying the late winter sun. Some jogging. Most are Chinese, of them about 80/20 Cantonese local vs Mandarin mainlanders. The foreigners, expats, speak Italian, Spanish, French and English. Sometimes Russian. Many have kids and dogs. Many have bikes and scooters.

Friends sometime pass by. And sit for a chat. Sometimes come home to our place for a cuppa. The Koel, a cuckoo, calls his plaintive cry, prepping for his annual act of perfidy.

Most folks are not wearing masks, maybe 90% not. Of the few that are, all are Chinese. Outdoors, in a fresh easterly….

I rang my mother, Mutti, just now, but it was 6:55 pm there in Oz, she was about to sit down and watch the news on the ABC, and asked me to ring back in an hour. It’s entirely possible to live a happy and productive life watching only “Auntie” ABC in Australia, for news. Or only the BBC in the UK, or only MSNBC in America. Mutti is rising 102 and proof of it. But you’ll not know a lot of what’s going on, the stuff that MSM have decided is not good for you to know. Cause you might vote for the wrong person. Again, entirely possible to do that and be happy doing so. And ending with this observation is rather like ending on a conspiracy theory. Yes. Still, I’d rather know a fuller picture. You can never know it all; who can? Just a bit more informed than Auntie and the Beens might have you know.

And I think of son John, over at the UCLA Law School who’s getting ready to go to the Vis Moot in Vienna, as rhe UCLA team of five. 300 teams.More at Wikipedia. Quite a big deal, but he didn’t say anything about it: we learned by accident. Weird. 

Time to give Mutti a ring. Time to enjoy the passing passeggiata folk. Time to enjoy the warm late-day sun. Free vitamin D. 

It’s a very lovely scene here. 

TTFN.

Birds in a backyard Discovery Bay, Hong Kong | And… The First Ko-el

“Winter visitors” seen in our backyard, from my chair in the lounge room, seen in last few days…

Fork-tailed Sunbird (M). In our Bauhinia bush and…

…the next day Fork-tailed Sunbird (F) in same bush. 
They love the flowers

Blue Magpie. In our kitchen garden. Likes meat and bones 

Little Egret — dark morph (rare). Hunts by our fish pond

Grey-backed Thrush. Usually a lawn skulker, and …

…cf, its more common cousin, the Violet Whistling Thrush…

… which always fans its tail. And looooves snails.

Orange-rumped Munia. Hunts insects on our lawn

Chinese Pond Heron. Winter visitor 

An occasional visitor, not just winter, also stopped by today:

Greater Coucal, shy, elegant 

These above are are all a bit unusual in our garden. 

Our common daily birds are: several varieties of Bulbul (crested; red-vented; Chinese), Speckled Doves, Magpie Robins, Crested Mynahs, the Violet Thrush (above), Japanese White-eyes, Tailor birds and the common Sparrow. In the skies: Herons, Black-eared Kites and Sea Eagles float above our skies. We get occasional visits from Peregrine Falcons and Kestrels, and were lucky to see an actual kill on our lawn recently. 

ADDED (August 2023): a family of White-breasted Waterhen, mother and 3 babies, live in our hedge and lawn.

ADDED: And this morning (10/2/23) the first sounds of our Spring visitor, the Koel. Up in the trees. Planning its raid of other birds’ nests, where they lay their own in amongst them and fool the original inhabitant to incubate them. Imagine the surprise! These are the parasitic habits of the Koel, member of the cuckoo family. And which remind me of  Ken Keasey’s  “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that I wrote about the other day. 

[ADDED (ii): Arlene says she heard the first Koel on 1st of February].Last year we heard the last call on 5 July.

“Koel” is onomatopoeic, for the sound of fhe male’s call, starting low and rising, ever quicker, ever more urgent, until it suddenly stops. Gets a bit grating after a while. 

The Asian Koel. That crazy eye! Is that where 
Ken Keasey got his title? A crazy cuckoo?

[Note: where the photos aren’t mine they’re from public commons and chosen to be closest to the sort of bush we saw them in here]

Wintry HK backyard | Snowy?

Why shouldn’t we feed our birds?

Discovery Bay, Central Park eatery, the MooFish

I was walking our dogs in the park one day. Siena One Central Park, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. (To be precise).

I bumped into a fellow dog walker, and we got chatting, as fellow canophiles do. I don’t know her name, so let’s call her Karen. A Gweilo, as we say here.

We got onto feeding birds and I commented that the birds we fed in our back yard — “our” birds — preferred bread to rice. “Ironic”, I said, “here in Hong Kong and they prefer western food to Chinese”. I know. Weak joke. But instead of a weak smile, I got a tirade. We shouldn’t be feeding birds! That’s unnatural! We should leave them to their own thing! Eating food they find themselves!

Taken aback, we parted and when I got home I consulted my Google. The website of the world’s oldest birds society, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says it’s perfectly fine to feed bread to birds, as long as you make sure it doesn’t have too much salt. I was feeding them my own home-made, organic, low-salt sourdough bread, so big tick there. And the rice is saltless.

So far: Me: 1. Karen: 0.

Other thoughts:

The birds are “ours” in the sense that they live on our land, but they consider it their own land. They know us. We know them. We are family. They breed in our trees and shrubs. They come into our house when we’re not looking.  Wandering around our indoors, we’ve had Crested Bulbuls, Magpie Robins, Speckled Doves, Asian Myna birds, Common Sparrows, Violet Whistling Thrushes, and even, once, an Emerald Flycatcher. 

They are comfortable with us, and we with them. Us feeding them is part of that. We are part of nature ourselves. Something that many of the Karens of the world deny. To them we are apart from nature, we are different, a pox, a virus on nature. When I counter that we part of nature, and that we are its most intelligent part, the most intelligent life form in the  universe, as far as we know, it's eyebrows raised, screwed up faces from the Karens. Don’t I know what damage humans are doing to the world? And don’t you know that feeding the birds our food is part of that damage?

I think of the birds that decide to hang out with humans. They’re the ones doing best. Like all animals. Dogs do better than wolves. Cats do better than tigers. Cattle do better than Ibex. Sure, we eat some of them; but they don’t know that do they?!

Of course we also want wolves and wolverines, our tigers and snow leopards, our Ibex and Kudu. This means setting land aside for them. Which we can do more when humans gather in cities, leaving the countryside to re-wild. Which we do as we get richer. So, getting richer is a good thing. For wild animals as well as those human-centred birds. Which in turn means capitalism. Which the Karens of the world despise. Look at China. It became richer by capitalism. That led to more city living, less in the country, better life for wildlife. While better life for domestic animals and the birds that come to our windowsills. 

By all means, feed birds. It’s natural!

“Our Kestrel" -- or perhaps (more likely?) a Peregrine Falcon

Above video by Jing, in our backyard, after killing a starling, plucking it on a branch of our Poinciana tree, showering us in a snow-flurry of feathers, then proceeded to eat it over the next few hours. Leaving a half-eaten bloody carcass from time to time for a bit of a fly. I imagine if you’re a falcon, flying must be super fun, what with the wings of angels, and wonderful eyesight.

My photo: Falcon just killed a Speckled Starling, on our back lawn.
Keeping a falcon eye out for potential thieves

I’m still not 100% sure, Kestrel or Peregrine. Of course, both are falcons. 

I thought we’d identified it as a Kestrel on the basis of the “The Birds of Hong Kong”, a winter visitor, October to March, which we’d last seen on the same tree on Christmas eve last year, and thus “our Kestrel” returned. But then, the colour seems too dark, and it’s a bird that it’s killed. Peregerines are darker, Kestrels usually brown. Peregrines kill other birds, Kestrels tend to kill small mammals on the ground. (So Wiki tells me).

If it is a Peregrine falcon, it’s a member of the family which is the fastest animal on earth, reaching speeds of 380 kph in their “stoop”, or steep dive. They have special bone formation in their noses (beaks?) to limit to flow of air to their lungs during dives, to avoid damage to the lungs from the speed of the incoming air. That’s also pretty amazing!

Have been sent a link to webcam in Melbourne, showing the Peregrine falcon there with her chicks. Thanks to Jane! It was that that got me rethinking the identity of “our Kestrel”, as I looked them all up on Wiki. Kestrels and Peregrines both members of that noble family, falcons or “Falconiformes”. They mate for life (👏). Females larger than males. In the wild, nest high on cliffs. Now thriving in cityscapes where they love to nest on the side of tall buildings, as at 367 Collins St. 

Imagine stepping off that ledge -- as I just saw mummy Peregrine do -- and not plummeting to the earth, but soaring..., sharp eyes out for a yummy pigeon. Which I’ve just watched her feed to the four chicks. She took ages over it, hungry squeaking fluffy balls.

December 2021

Lying Flat

Lying flat (“Tǎng píng”) 躺平. A no-no for Beijing. With Zero Covid policy, you always have to be doing “something”.

Not like this Speckled Dove on our table. Keeping cool by lying flat...

Cattle Egret

 

Cattle Egret with breeding plumage, stalking our back garden. Status: “resident and widespread” in Hong Kong, mostly in northern New Territories.(“Birds of Hong Kong”). The “cattle” bit cause you often see them grabbing a quick ride on the backs of Water Buffalo.

In our garden they’re rare, and usually seen lurking around our Koi Karp pond, eyeing an easy meal, not stalking grubs in the lawn. “Breeding” plumage, so maybe looking for a mate?

(Hidden) Urban Fish Pond

Our korner Koi Karp pond, with starling 

Huddled birds

 

South Plaza, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong

8 Centigrade, windy. Brrrrr..... for Hong Kong