Something about doves

 

In order to survive, a dove’s hatchling needs the best of luck from all angles possible. It seems a fickle, vacillating and indecisive parenting. They need their guardian angels to be at maximum alert to thwart the renegadely lurking agents of death. The nest is so fragile and small, almost hitting high notes of imperishment as the bizarre, complicated sub-plots of life and death unfold around. It’s an almost see-through, flat assemblage of thin twigs placed at almost a public place, among easily reachable branches at a hand’s reach. Its mere sight giving a pickling and grilling push to the taste buds of many a predatory bird. The souls of cats getting into stir-frying and deep-frying mode at the culinary prospects.

You need to make a substantive leap of faith to collect any rhyme or reason on the question of how do they even survive as a species. The nest bears such a frustrating anatomy that even by a gentle breeze the egg or the hatchling may plop down by itself to the delight of brooding dark shadows of mortality. So among the boiling and steaming culinary scenarios, if a creamy-white egg survives and a hatchling comes out, even this can be taken as a successful nesting. As the burgeoning, cascading clamor of life moves on, the majority of the hatchlings survive for a few days at the most. It’s a miracle that the doves still survive as a species. It seems impossible without prompt, belligerent defense by mother existence itself. Maybe mother nature sets up a miraculous scheme of chance factors to keep some odd baby bird alive.

The cats are in love, following freaky mirages most of the time, so their absence in the garden means that one egg out of three survived. The other two were taken by the guest treepie after the expletive-rich fight that went for three days, rewarding it with two eggs. The rufous brown and pale chestnut bird kept threatening and blustering for three days to chuck out two out of three eggs.

The honey buzzard seems to be away on its poaching foray. It hasn’t been seen for a few weeks even though there is a bigger honeycomb near the dove hatchling.

The treepie then returned with a whippy and aggressive attitude to have a heavy lunch on the hatchling also. The doves, with their tentative gazelle looks, fought tooth and nail to foil its efforts. But a crow, spurred by a thieving itch, unapologetically swooped down to clutch the prize with an eerie precision to give the little one its first and the last flight. Now, the laughing dove is crying through its chuckling notes. To the uninformed audience she must be sounding laughing. But I know her situation and feel her pain oozing through her ripply, cuddling laughing chuckles.

Isn’t it that most of our instinctive reactions and the consequent emotions of anger, hate, jealousy, fear and prejudices are born of our ignorance of the reality surrounding that individual? It’s so easy to get judgmental of someone without being aware of the complete picture. Like taking the cries of a distraught dove as joyful chuckles! So it helps to know a bit more about people and their situations beyond a point that merely appears on the surface.