Call Of The Hammerhead Stork

The long warm day was coming to a close. Over the river wraiths of mist began to rise, and the air along the watercourse felt dank and chill. The higher hills, still touched by the sun, glowed with color reflected from the tints of sunset. The flat-topped thorn-trees and cactus-like shapes of the giant euphorbias cast long and exaggerated shadows down into the valley below. Only the squat, South African bush showed no color, but looked black and uninviting. It was wintertime in Natal. The bush clung close to the river or grew in clumps where moisture seeped through ledges of the cliffs rising from the waters' edge.

Although it looked forbidding, it was there that the birds were singing their evening songs, and the monkeys called in long querulous tremolo, or shouted at each other from the tree tops where they sat sunning themselves, their white chests catching the last rays of light and shining like dress shirts against the somber darkness of their background.

The world seemed at peace. There were no sharp calls of alarm. The hawks had declared a temporary truce and the owls had not yet started on their evening hunts. Even the quarrelsome Drongo shrikes were quietly preening on the bare, dead branches of a wild fig tree. Into this quiet interlude however, there suddenly broke a wild clanging call that echoed up and down the cliffs along the river and stopped as suddenly as it had started.

It was the call of the hammerhead "stork", and at the head of a silvery pool it stood quietly gazing down into water that mirrored in black on silver the dull-brown motionless form. For several minutes the bird made no move except to turn its head from side to side as though studying its reflection. Then apparently dissatisfied with the spot as a fishing place it walked up the bank with an awkward strutting gait.

It stopped to preen and rearrange a few feathers, then, looking up, it suddenly showed interest and once more gave forth its wild clanging cry, greetings to a second member of its race. Both birds loitered on the bank in the gathering dusk, soon only indistinct brown shadows in the darkness.

Suddenly one of the birds, as if at last deciding to do some work, reached down, picked up a six-inch length of driftwood, and flew directly to the top of a mass of debris seemingly entangled in the fork of a large thorn-tree that leaned out over the river. The second bird followed, and as the first dropped its stick, both birds commenced to clamor loudly. For a few minutes both flapped their wings and bowed and minced about in antics entirely unexpected in so homely and decorous a bird. It was the courtship dance.