Yesterday, as I walked back from coffee with John to the CPO ticket office, which - it turned out - had ran out of my anticipated tickets for the ‘Sweet Life’, a Magpie treated me to the dance like elegance of its flight. Coming from high up behind me, it was descending to a tree perch well ahead of me along the Stephen Ave Mall, just as I passed the ‘Scraps Metal Horse’.

The bird descended with its wings spread, displaying it well known two tone [hence Magpie] pattern catching my attention. Its glide ended in a slight upturn, in which the bird slowed folding its wings compactly. All I could see now was just an elegant stone like object, black, dropping lower and forward.

Then, the wings and tail feathers spread again changing the drop into a slowing glide and in a moment or two turning slightly up once more, slowing, feathers now folding in tight again to the Magpie‘s body and dropping once more like a pointed black stone shooting forward in its direction of flight.

This show of elegant cadence was repeat by the bird until it was low and slow enough to light on a suitable perch in one of the many trees along this avenue. What a performance I just witnessed, a bird’s ballet - it was close the Performing Arts Centre - all pro Deo. This performance by the way does not come naturally! I saw young spring birds attempting to land in a Spruce tree, time and time again, as I was perched in my tenth floor apartment in Zeist NL, back in 2002.

I also saw others practicing dropping along side the building and then braking their fall by spreading their wings, to land in the tree top, the parents teaching by example their off spring at that time of year. And at my sister Els’ garden gazebo, back then, I even saw a Lark parent show its brown coloured off spring, how to dry its spread wing feathers, by sort of wiping them of against the sun soaked straw roof.

That teaching stops when the young bird takes on the colours of the its adult stage, but for a while you can notice the young ones continued clamouring for the old ones to look after them. To this, these respond by showing them how and what to pick, but not feeding them; from here on they are on their own.
<10:38am and 6:39pm edited~