A Really Quite Funny Story

Since we moved to Orkney I have written a short piece about our life here every quarter for the magazine of the church where I worshipped in Leeds. I recently came across this offering again from Summer 2012 and really it is too funny not to share.

A couple of weekends ago Andy went out to the byre and as he walked back through the front door he said ‘I found a really strange bird lying on the floor of the byre by the door; it’s very pretty but I’ve no idea what it is’. My response to this was to grunt ‘Oh’, in the semi-interested tone I use when I know something has enthused him but which really doesn’t excite me at all. In fact I didn’t even look up from my knitting. As it turned out, that was a mistake as it  meant that I was perfectly unprepared to have the said  bird thrust under my nose for inspection.

Now I am not particularly fond of birds close up. A lot of our friends and neighbours keep chickens and point out that, with all our land we could do the same. We could keep lots. Tens! Hundreds! Egg factory! (Well perhaps they don’t go so far as the egg factory). When this happens I mutter something about the form filling, and the general susceptibility of poultry to a myriad of bizarre diseases and what a tie they are when, like us, you really are rather attached to holidays. I never say that hens actually creep me out with their wicked little eyes and their sharp pointy beaks and their nasty head bobbing habit. In fact one of the worst moments of my life in Orkney came when an overenthusiastic friend, showing off her newly acquired poultry, bent down, scooped up one of birds and thrust her into my arms exhorting me to  ‘say hello to Henny-Penny’. I’m really rather proud of the fact that I didn’t immediately drop the luckless Henny-Penny and run screaming in the opposite direction.

So you will understand that I wasn’t best pleased to have a dead bird, however pretty, waved around six inches from my face. I may have expressed a certain amount of displeasure, possibly in a higher than usual voice and possibly quite loudly. I know I asked him to take it away. Asked him several times when  he didn’t seem to be  responding quickly enough (like at the speed of light) to my initial request.

He took it out as far as the hall and laid it tenderly on the window sill; then he took a photo and started looking it up in his bird books. I pointed out that now he had the photo, he didn’t actually need the bird itself in the house for identification.

‘I hope it’s not a corncrake’ he said, ignoring my comment completely. ‘ It looks a bit like one and you’re supposed to report sightings. It wouldn’t look good if we were reporting a corncrake that one of the cats had got.’

This was undeniably true. ‘I don’t suppose for a minute’ said I dismissively ‘that it’s actually a corncrake. The only reported sightings on Orkney have been over by Marwick.’

‘Well it looks very like this picture’ he said. ’Come and look’.

‘I am not coming anywhere near that dead bird. Take it away, and I’ll come and look at the photo and your book’.

He sighed but picked the bird up and took it out. I looked at the photograph and the picture of the bird. I was relieved to see that clearly it was not a corncrake.

‘It’s not a corncrake’ I said ‘The colour’s wrong. And the feet’.

‘Are you sure?’ he said, in a  tone of voice that suggested he would really rather that it were a corncrake, albeit a dead one, than not. ‘I think I’ll just take the book back to the byre and have another look. And before I could ask him why on earth he had returned a dead bird to the byre, he was gone. I went back to my knitting.

And then he came back, very quickly. ‘You’ll never guess what just happened. I went  over to have another look at that bird and as I got close it jumped up and ran away. It gave me quite a turn’.

I reflected silently that it hadn’t given him half as much of  a turn as it would have given me had it jumped up and run about while inside my house. That really wasn’t something that I wanted to think about.

‘Anyway’ he said ‘I’m almost sure it’s a water rail, and they’re related to crakes’.

We sent the photo off to the local RSPB office and the staff there confirmed it was indeed a water rail, which is a skulking sort of bird rarely seen, although more often heard. So we were lucky to have seen one, although a shame the poor thing had to stun itself first. And to be honest even I thought it was quite pretty, in a chestnut/buff sort of way, although take it from me, it has really ugly feet!