It seems like a dry patch of ground.

Surely, nothing can grow there? What life can be underneath the dried-out sand?

But this little bird friend would not be there if there were no snacks. And does this not speak to our human mind always thinking from our perspective that a piece of ground is "dead" when there are no signs of life (again, according to our judgment)?

The Karoo Thrush (Turdus smithi) is a medium size bird I have come to know by staying up north in South African in Pretoria. Back home on the coast, we have a different kind of thrush (olive thrush). Very similar birds, but this one's call is a little bit different. But both birds are active earlier in the morning and later afternoons. Their particular calls always remind of home, even though home is currently all over the country!

Back to the dry patch of earth our little friend surveyed. I could not see any insects, nor are there anything green growing in the area. But somehow it was finding snacks for itself to eat. They mainly eat insects, from what I know, so I guessed that it was insects that attracted its attention.

Across the road, there are various trees in which various treats waited (I would guess) but this barren piece of land attracted it!

And does this not speak to our human instinct to label something as barren if it does not fit our mind as being something full of life?

We are sometimes so smart, my granddad always said, that we become stupid.

Because even though this piece of land looks barren to us, it might be filled with small creatures that serve as perfect snacks for our little friend, or it might be full of seeds, ready to sprout when the rains fall. Small insects might then eat these seeds, again serving as food for our bird friend.

And that will probably be our demise; we destroy land that looks uninhabited, we build cities on land that seems more useful under concrete layers, without realizing that we destroy the very fabric that keeps us alive. We think we can create rain and grow food in chemicals of our own creation, but soon we will come to realize that those patches of dry land kept our planet in harmony and it fed the thousands of animals that helped keep the balance.

Stupid we are in our hubris.

Postscriptum, or So The Small Bird Runs Away

Running after our friend here to snap a couple of images, he decided to depart. I snapped a couple of last photographs and it jumped up on top of our human concrete layers and skid off. He had enough of this philosopher photographer trying to take pictures of it!

But we cannot run away from our problems. I saw the quote from Micheal Scott, a fictional character in the series The Office,

I am running away from my responsibilities. And it feels good.

We are not so much running away, and it is not necessarily from our responsibilities, but we are turning a blind eye to the situation and when it is too late we will wonder how it happened.

But on a positive note, these bird friends are still with us. And we can admire their beauty.

Happy birding, and stay safe! And let us be the change we want to see in the world, even if only by not buying that one drink using useless plastics.

The photographs used in this post are my own taken with my Nikon D300. The writings are also my own.