When I was a safari guide, many moons ago, there was a stork colony that we’d drive to and were guaranteed to see great game. Situated on an ox-box lagoon were three or four old gnarled and weatherbeaten ebony and winterthron trees that the squawking nesting storks would make their home for a few months of the year. They’d decorate the place white and play loud music; you could hear them long before you actually bumped across the ox-bow and rounded the corner to the drama of their lives.
The trees were adorned with teeny baby fluffy white storks. And they’d sit atop their trees and squawk and shout and flap their wings. And the parents would wearily go off every morning and fish. And they’d bring the slippery flappy fish for the upturned babies’ beaks. And many would find their mark into the babies’ bottomless tummies but a good many more would slither and fall to the bottom. And every now and then the cute little fluffies would also lose their footing and tumble down.
Into?
Camera pans down and cue dark scary music.
The waiting big toothed jaws of the predators below. There they lurked and circled, waiting for the feeding frenzy. A slippery fish here, a succulent fledgling there, its eagerness to fly outsmarted by its inability to do so.
Crocodiles, hyenas, marabou storks, civets, leopards. Nocturnal and diurnal, airborne, waterborne and land (bourne?). Mammal and reptile. All classifications forgotten.
The reason for this rambling narrative? It reminds me of something. Every time I put my daughter in her high chair to feed her the cat gets up from wherever he has been basking and starts circling underneath, waiting for the baby to drop her bits of food. Which she does, most diligently. A twirl of pasta here, a chicken drumstick there. And every day, three times a day on a small hill on the outskirts of a Tanzanian town, they re-enact a suburban version of the Nsefu Stork Colony.
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