The Training of Tawny - Part 4

Tawny and the bantams

At dawn bushbuck and duiker browse through the garden.  Bushpigs dig over the compost; mongooses fossick in the flower beds after mole-crickets, beetle grubs and other delicacies. The fruits of the great wild fig, mimusops and quinine trees shading the lawns, as well as those in the orchard below, are gleefully gorged upon by somango monkeys, sun squirrels and every bird from hornbill to bulbul, and at night by bushbabies, tree civets and genets. Buck, bushpigs, civets, mongooses and the dark glossy chongololo millipedes, some of them nine inches long, gratefully pick up the fallen fruit dropped by the wasteful tree dwellers. ‘Tornado’, the great snail, antenna’s his way across the lawn. Clearly the use of any insecticide is out of the question.  Hence I keep a small flock bantams to help control the insects.

            Predators abound.  I lose quite a few bantams to them, and would surely lose them all but for the dogs.  At the first squawk of alarm from the bantams they rage out to chase off the attacker. When all is calm we go on to reunite the scattered chicks with their anxious mothers, sniff out any that are missing and, perhaps, if we haven’t been able to get there fast enough, find a pathetic bundle of bloodied feathers.  Shout ‘Hawk!’ or even say it in the softest whisper, Tawny races out to search the sky.  If she sees one she runs below it, preventing it from coming down, until it gives up and goes elsewhere.

            Some of the smaller hawks, however, come through the dense tree-tops, hop by cautious hop, drop and snatch a chick before anyone has seen them.  If it is raining, civets, normally nocturnal, sometimes venture out and under cover of the noise of the rain creep up on the flock unawares. Others are bolder. Crowned eagles tumble in the sky, yelping musically and giving their presence away. In a parasol tree on the edge of the garden where the thick branches grow out from a crown like a giant umbrella blown inside out, an eagle began to build a nest, in good view of the bantams’ range – a flat above the restaurant. Furious that she couldn’t reach it, or prevent it building there, Tawny nevertheless fumed at it so constantly that it lost its nerve and moved its nest site further into the forest.

            Hens will sing about a new-laid egg, take to the air shrieking ‘Freedom!’ when they leave the broody nest for a meal or a dustbath, scream ‘Rape! Rape!’ hysterically as the cock chases them, trying desperately to keep his upright stance, wings stiffly at his side, which is so impressive when he’s standing but ridiculously awkward to maintain when running; and sometimes a hen will take to crowing herself.  Tawny will barely flick an ear at all this nonsense. She pays more attention to the cock.

            Among his extensive vocabulary is a special sound that means he sees a danger high, high in the sky, and everyone must keep dead still.  It even sounds a bit like ‘Freeze!’ Another sound means a bird is flying low – a sudden flash of wings.  Yet another means something is walking on the ground. Tawny understands these warnings and takes careful note, although, as they are quite small sounds, she is not always within earshot. The cock’s full alarm cry, of course, is unmistakable and Tawny can rush to his aid, hurtling over the stonewall contours of the steep garden faster than any of us could without breaking a leg.

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The pretty legend about tiny chicks scuttling under the mamma hen when alarmed certainly doesn’t apply to my bantams. Instead the hen leaps up flapping and squawking, making a fine target and distraction of herself, while the chicks dive under the nearest cover and crouch motionless, sometimes for hours, until she clucks them out again. Sometimes she doesn’t know where they are and is so distressed that, instead of giving reassuring clucks to bring them out of hiding, she goes on shouting as if she thinks the predator must have got them all, and the chicks stay hidden.  Then Tawny is called to nose them out one by one and reunite them with their anxious mother.

            I give her a fairly free hand in this. The chicks are so tiny and well camouflaged, hiding under a dry leaf or a bend of grass, that I could easily step on them.

            One evening when we were looking for a day-old chick, with the dark almost upon us, I noticed her lying down with her chin between her paws, her eyes swivelling as she watched me searching carefully through the grass. This was quite unlike her. Usually she works with such enthusiasm I have to sometimes tell her, ‘Gently, slow down!’

            ‘Come on, Tawny,’ I called, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

            Minutes later, when she hadn’t moved, I went over to her. ‘On your feet, woman! Work!’ I urged, gentling back my impatience. ‘Find kip-kip!’

            Without lifting her head from her pawns, her eyes turned up to my face, she slowly opened her mouth and out tripped the missing chick like a gently bowled marble, quite unharmed. The tip of Tawny’s tail flipped apologetically: she isn’t allowed to take so much as a fallen feather in her mouth, let alone a live chick. She must have fished this little mite out of its hiding place and then not known quite what to do about it.

            More than once I have scolded her for apparently abandoning the search and going way off on her own. Then she shames me by coming back with a missing chicken, patiently nosing it through the grass and bushes to rejoin the others.

            Jack built the bantams a super house – stronger than the cracked and ancient house we ourselves live in – that even a honey badger, who could dig you out of a maximum security prison if he had a mind to, cannot break into. Bantams mostly like to roost in trees, out in God’s own fresh typhoon, where they fall easy prey to predators.  But get the cock to go in the house and the hens usually follow.

            Tawny makes sure they do. She rounds up the loiterers and hustles them in, then follows, looking around the roosts and the nesting boxes, for all the world as if she is counting them.

            The hens don’t care to sleep long in the nesting boxes, for reasons of heat and hygiene, and often before their chicks are really big enough to hop up the ladders to roost, flap upstairs, clucking encouragingly for the babies to follow. I let them try for a while and if they can’t make it, either lift the hen down and tell her to go to sleep in a box for a few more nights, or lift the chicks up to her.

            They are difficult to catch, being worried and feeling very small and abandoned down on the floor. So I crouch down and cup my palms low to the floor, and very gently Tawny noses and nudges the cheeping little chicks into my hands.  Before long they learn to hop in by themselves, as taking-for-granted as office workers stepping into a lift.

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