Hadedas are iridescent grey-brown ibises – jack russell-sized birds with long, curved bills and very small heads – found throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
They have a special skill called “remote touch”, which they use to find their worm, grub and snail prey. At the tip of their bills is an organ that, when they stick it into the soil, can sense the vibrations of their food nearby.
This sense works best in wet soil, something researchers discovered by having hadedas dip their beaks into trays of soil that held buried worms. In one of the trays, the sounds the worms make (what exactly are the sounds the worms make, I wonder) had been muffled by white noise. In another, the worms were dead. In a third, crushed, dead worms were interred with the live ones. Up close, hadedas have an alarmed expression, as though they have heard far too much.
There are many more onomatopoeic names for them, in many southern African languages: ing’ang’ane in South Africa’s isiXhosa; zililili, chihuahua and mwanawawa, in Malawi’s Chiyao, Tumbuka, and Khonde. But nothing can quite capture the sound, because it is mainly just rude noise. Noise at dawn that makes you long for a rooster, noise at twilight, as what was two hadedas poking around on a lawn turns into a flock flying away to roost in one of Johannesburg’s many, many trees. (People anticipated their call during a local performance of John Cage’s famously silent 4’33).
My father has had a severe stroke, miraculously while both my sister and I are in South Africa, where he lives, and not far away in Australia and England, where we live. The left side of his body is paralysed, he cannot walk or use his left hand. But very soon, he can talk – though he doesn’t really seem to want to.
I’ve seen the hadedas on this visit, and of course have heard them. But the living things I have noticed during this hard week have been a tortoise – glimpsed in perfect profile through the fence of a house on a busy road – making its way across a lawn by lifting one leg at a time. The flying ants drifting upwards from the flower beds outside the hospital entrance – they emerge after rain, and it has rained almost every day. Purple alliums in those flower beds. My father had them in the garden of our childhood home, too. Why would you plant flowers that smell like onions? And the schnauzer who belongs to the friends with whom I’m staying. He has a sorrowful howl, they call it his song. In the evenings, he will let you cradle him like a baby.
I’m not sure that I should be here. I visit my father in the hospital, many times a day. Each time he is understandably, but unusually, short with me. I feel officious and awkward. I play him voice notes from friends; they tell him about birds they have seen. My father loves birds.
On Sunday I tell my father that I am struggling to write about the hadedas. I can’t find the information he once told me, that researchers want to copy the design of their bills for machines that they hope might detect whether there is life on Mars. He tells me the long story of where he heard this. Then he says that there is a university in America that has the biggest bird library in the world. I imagine the hadedas reading under lamplight, their bills tucked into their breasts. “It is the fount of all bird knowledge,” my father says.
I say that I thought he was the fount of all bird knowledge. He smiles and there is a puff of air through his lips. It is the first time in a week that I have managed to make him laugh.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
