Bennett: Of Birds and Bees

WHEN our mulberry tree bursts with ripe fruits, our backyard hums with a crescendo of chirps. We really don’t mind sharing the berries with the hungry brown birds. After all, we can’t eat all of them, albeit reach the high soft branches.

That time of the year reminds me that trees are not only for keeping water inside the ground but also for the birds to seek insects and shelter too.

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The flower festival ushered into the park all the kinds of vendors one could imagine. The interesting ones brought along their bird chirps trapped in bamboo pipes. It would be one fantastic treat to have people chirping through pipes instead of blowing horns on new year. Then we could have the music of bird chirps twice a year in our backyard. Not bad indeed.

At the park, I wondered if the brown birds responded to the chirp pipes. It was a pleasant surprise to hear the chirps above the clanging ice cream bells that came from the different corners of the park. But they were easily noted as fake imitations of the trill in the bird chirps. I watched from the window a group of birds playing hide and seek in the carpet of dara-dara and kutsarita. With each trill of the bird pipe, the birds didn’t seem to mind the sound. Could it be that these were unnatural sounds to them as well?

Anyway, it was amusing how the birds dove into the leaves of the plants and emerged as again from under the fronds. I never saw birds play so long on land. It dawned on me that maybe the ground leaves were better than the thin pine branches of the balding pines.

I can’t wait for the season when we can host the merry birds in the backyard again. 

And for the bees, bees and bees that seemed to have attracted many participants of “The Color of A Spectrum” by the Baguio Photographers Club in last January’s exhibit at SM, even these special children caught on with the difference in texture of the bees against the petals of flowers. It was wonderful how they spotted and captured the images of the bees loading up on pollen at the Botanical Garden. It must have appeared queer to them that a bees was blocking the view of their subjects. But the texture did render the pictures as perfect.

I also liked the mosquito that disturbed the surface tension of the pond. It seemed as if the surface tension was holding it up and preventing it from drowning. 

As beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, we don’t have to wonder how these special children see the world. I guess not any much different from how we see ours but even finer tuned. To them each speck is important and beautiful, like Talek and his fascination for the arrangement of pebbles along a path.

Oh well, so much for the birds and the bees. I should stop wondering how we people mess up the simple pleasures of life.