04.24.10 kulturnatib

Birds

After a while of being away, home is no longer a given. True, it is still there, but there has changed. For the best, the worse and, especially, forever.

Given that visiting home could not be worse than at election time, which often is timed for the hottest months of the year, that immediately gray-tinted my immediate appraisal of the city upon touchdown.

Yes, there are more high-rises, many racing towards completion. Yet, these not only tended to crowd out the sky but also seemed to choke the streets as well. More, as glass is the cladding material of choice for these buildings, in their neighborhood the heat gets magnified beyond unbearable.

Still, as we settled down, a more heartening picture presented itself. Not in the in-your-face manner of the city inexorably hurtling towards crowdedness even as, where we were, this was difficult to miss or ignore, but in the more subtle hint of a solitary note, then a call, then a mix of several distinguishable songs.

These were definitely more than last year, our first homecoming with our daughter in tow, when the only bird sound I seemed to hear was the crowing of roosters.

This observation I admit was influenced in no small part by our daughter who, hearing live roosters for the first time and just a few meters away at that, took to clambering up the window jalousy to see better the source of the sound that she recognized only as reproduced in books and other electronic media.

This time, rather surprisingly, the roosters didn't seem to be crowing. It is possible though that with more interesting tunes coming from other birds whose kind and numbers easily overpowered the roosters they were pushed towards the outer periphery of our attention.

Also, even last year, to our daughter's disappointment, she could have scaled the window all the way to the last jalousy pane and she would still not have spied any rooster. We just knew the roosters were nearby by the proximity of their sound.

We did spy some roosters through the cracks of the hollow block wall, but they, like all birds, hardly stayed put even if they were tethered in place. Consequently they would flit in and out of our vantage point. Observing them was an exercise in frustration.

Not, however, with these other birds. They were as free as the cliché allowed them and as that goes, moreover, allowing only for one kind of bird; the flying kind.

They were definitely the flying kind. But it wasn't this ability that snared my attention. It was their songs; As singular as fingerprints yet many times more captivating.

Still more captivating was the thought bolstered by what admittedly is anecdotal evidence that there were more of them number and species-wise.

Immediately I surmised that these birds must no longer be hunted or simply shot at the way they were when it seemed like the mayas were the only birds left owing, it must be, to their being uninteresting targets.

I thought to stop by at the shop of one of the city's more popular gunsmiths at that time when air rifles were a popular adult toy and birds were popular subjects to toy with to see how my theory held up.

Even as this shop was not far away from our ancestral house where my mother and a some siblings with their families still live my theory, for lack of time to test it, remained just that.

Yet, the fact also remains, providing an unexpected bonus to our homecoming, that the birds are there.