Sunbirds

(This is one of a series of articles I wrote dealing with memories of an African childhood. To read the first of these, click here)

Two Eyes has (appropriately enough) two videos of hummingbirds at his bird feeder - Hummingbird Video and Hummingbirds ...more than I can count. I found them fascinating, not only because hummingbirds are so rarely seen and yet in profusion in these videos, but also because they reminded me of the sunbirds of Africa.

Sunbirds are really just big hummingbirds and they take their name from the fact that they are like flying jewels, iridescently colored emerald green, ruby red, aquamarine blue and golden, colors that flash and reflect the light of the sun so that they really are creatures of the bright sunshine. There was only one place where we knew we were guaranteed to see them: Ewanrigg Botanical Garden, near Harare in Zimbabwe.

This was perhaps the best example of the European concept of "garden" adapted to an African theme. Instead of fighting the heat and glare of the African sun, battling against dehydration with constant irrigation to achieve a greenness foreign to such a climate, Ewanrigg went with the flow, accepting that lawns were going to be parched dry and brown, and populating the dry, rocky high points with the aloes that thrived on dessication, the few pools surrounded by those strange tree ferns, the cycads. The native trees too were allowed to grow, providing their patchy areas of shade for the sun-bleached visitor.

It was a wonderfully peaceful landscape, as I recall it, a welcome change from the open grassland of the highveld. And, when the aloes were flowering, the sunbirds were there, delighting us with their brilliant colors and zig-zagging flight, hovering before some great orange or white aloe flower before zooming off to the next, sating themselves on the nectar. They were so much a part of the garden that I cannot remember them ever being absent in any of our visits; in fact, I think it was for them we came before anything else. Perhaps my parents were wise enough to know the times when the aloes would be in bloom but I was too young to take note of such things.

To see those hummingbirds in James' videos took me right back to Ewanrigg in an instant, a place I have not visited since my early teens. Some quick research on the net has reassured me that the gardens still exist and so I have been able to provide the link up there for any who are interested. And it is good to know that, in Texas at least, similar scenes are enacted daily.

Technorati tags: Sunbirds; Ewanrigg; Aloes.

(to read the next of the African Memories articles, click here)