Village Idiot

At present my wife is back in Costa Rica doing stuff and so I am here alone in the remote north of Australia, my normal time killer when i am not asleep or at work is to go birding, I live net door to the fantastic Botanical Garden and I went for a walk around in the late afternoon sun, it is always sunny actually, I was just putting that in to build the picture, the place is almost tropical as you would expect for the tropics, but this is not normal tropics. This place has a very long dry season of 8 months and the surrounding countryside is pretty dry, it is a dry forest type environment. So I was walking around in the sunshine with my binoculars trying to find some birds and failing miserably. There wasn't much about at all, perhaps i was too late, afternoon isn't a great time normally but even so i could hear a few but see nothing, I was getting despondent. After my walk around the monsoon rainforest section where there is a Rufous Owl supposedly roosting, which i never saw, I was thinking about going home, but I followed the path up to the plant nursey as it was a part I had not been around before. I was looking around probably looking like a burglar or peeping tom with my bins and all the other folks here are old farts, just up for the winter, rich folks from down the prosperous south of Australia like Sydney and Adelaide and Bribaine where the weather is cold and rainy this time of year. So I saw a large bird fly over and head for a tree so I was getting desperate to see and identify anything so i followed and saw it land in a a tall tree and I saw it immediately challenged by a sitting bird in the tree and it bounced about being pushed about by other birds also in the tree, the tree was alive with large fat yellow birds. I was so happy I could have squealed with delight but for all the old farts around looking at the flowers and trees and bushes, not the birds, i didn't want to appear demented as well as a peeping tom. So I sat down on a large stone and started watching the bird show, they were fighting and squawking and bouncing about and eating lots of small berries on the tree, with my binoculars i could see them stripping the berries form the tree and the tree seemed to be full of berries like coffee beans, small green berries, all the smaller branches were full of them, The birds were bright yellow with a black head and a large red eye patch, beautiful birds but were fighting like crazy things, hoping to keep all the tree for themselves. it was a fantastic show and I was enjoying the birds but all the old farts just looked at me like i was insane. While I was sat there I could see a particularly well dressed woman looking at me intently and then looking at what i was looking at and then back to me, she was with a much younger couple and they were intently examining all the plants. The old woman finally plucked up courage to speak to me, "you a tourist then", she said. I was surprised at what she said, not "what are the birds" or "Are you a peeping tom" or "I think all the birds should be poisoned", So i told her I was living here now, she then said " What are you looking at", as though there is something up in the tree other than birds, I should have told her there were some large poisonous jumping Fungi, but I am not normally quick enough to think of some witty repost. I told her of the birds and that they were eating the figs and the birds were called Green Figbirds. She said, "Oh yes I live on the Golf course and we get birds also", it was a strange posh accent heavily laden with hints of chinese, a very strange mix. I started to smile at this response as only an idiot would say something so silly, she then added "I used to feed the birds and we used to get some green and red noisy things so i stopped feeding them", the description is of a parrot, this country is full of parrots, probably the most common family of birds here and her not knowing it was a parrot also means she is an idiot, I could only conclude that she was an old rich trophy wife from years ago, she was 60 maybe and you could tell that she would have been attractive years ago but she would have been a airhead, I was almost laughing at here stupidity but that would have been rude but it made me feel life was worth living again for 10 minutes.

Green Figbird