Strength Of His Convictions

Days passed, and every day despite incubation and subsequent hatching, the parents of the baby Hammerhead storks brought additional contributions to the nest and heedlessly piled on more and more material. With each passing day the accumulation grew more bizarre. A fragment of filthy, worn out mutsha or leather apron, a broken gourd, part of a suit of B.V.D.'s, a pair of socks, pieces of torn paper, and other curious odds and ends. After the young had hatched, the nest received a most unsavory christening, repeated from day to day. Scraps of rotting meat, a partly-eaten frog, old bones, and then a lizard came to grace the cumbersome structure. As time passed, a faint and nauseating odor seeped into the blind.

The nest was filthy with unmentionable dirt, but this odor was different and came from some other source. It became necessary to investigate the cause of this new discomfort, and not far away, lying partly in the river, was the carcass of a decomposing bushbuck doe. It proved to be a bonanza for the laboring hammerheads, who draped the nest with fragments of skin and bones. As far as could be seen the carrion was not used as food, but seemed to the bewildered birds, torn between two instincts, halfway between food and building material, and in the stress of finding food for growing young, and adding to the bulky nest, the parents compromised as best they could.

This habit may have been an isolated case but other nests all had their share of disagreeable materials. The young birds grew fast. Then, one at a time, they left the nest. The last to go stayed on for several days and seemed afraid to make the start. When we opened it one day he showed fear for the first time scrambled for the tunnel, flopped and clawed clumsily downward, and then on weak and floppy wings sailed out and away, to disappear around the river bend. His leaving seemed to close the episode and but for my carelessness it would havt done so.

In climbing down the tree below the nest, I slipped and slightly scratched my arm. Having watched the sanitation of the nest, however, I washed my arm, and after doused the slight injury with iodine and forgot it. After a few days the arm became inflamed and for some time gave me quite a little pain and trouble. Coincident, or direct result of carelessness, this certainly gave my Zulu friend something to strengthen his convictions about the witch-bird U Tegwane. The new dynasty of this bird of evil omen had begun.