Birds

30 January 2011


When Becky and I woke up, we noticed that our hotel had a balcony, and that we could see a beautiful yellow bird in the tree just beyond the balcony. There were multiple nests hanging from the tree branches, and we saw the bird repeatedly carrying pieces of grass into two of them. That afternoon, we stopped by the library and learned that the bird was an inhlokohloko, or southern masked weaver in English, and that the males are polygamous and build multiple nests.

 Our campus, and apparently all of Pietermaritzburg, is filled with these birds. By consulting two South Africans, my Zulu-English dictionary, and a humongous old book of South African birds, I determined that they are called amankankane in Zulu and Hadash ibises in English. They make extremely loud screeching sounds, eat garage, and walk in a really hilarious way that looks like high-stepping.