Skip to main content

Cygnets

 

As it has for many people, Netflix's documentary The Social Dilemma has rocked me back on my heels a bit and caused me to rethink my engagement with social media. I've also been reading Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . OK. I'm kind of getting the point. So instead of browsing Facebook,  I pick up my cameras and head for Tomahawk.

The lagoon is covered in little swan families: mum, dad and the kids all busy breakfasting on duckweed. 

Each of the many dozens of families has a half dozen or so cygnets. They vary in size, according to their age but with their little fluffy bodies and beady little black eyes they are irresistibly cute. 

Their parents feed them by plucking weed from the bed of the lagoon - growing at depths beyond the babies' reach,- and dumping it down before them. The little guys wolf it down before it slowly sinks. 
They are covered in a hairy down, which seems to be easily soaked. Occasionally they sit on the backs of a parent, but mostly they bob about on the surface. 
I can't quite fathom the anatomy of their legs. There always seems to be one leg out of the water, so the cygnet is floating on its side somehow. I suppose this conserves body heat. 
They know how to swim. They know how to feed. They know when to rush to their parent. They are only a few days old. Within the year they will know how to fly and within two years they will be raising babies of their own. How do they know this stuff? What does "knowing" and "intelligent" mean? We have captured those words and made them into our human way of learning and understanding, but here that understanding doesn't fit. Here are little points of consciousness, each viewing the universe and each of them an "I".
 
Consider the birds of the air...  

These are all known and loved, as I am known and loved. Exactly as I am known and loved. 


I watch them for a couple of hours. I don't get out of my car, as the car acts as a kind of hide, and the birds are more confident about approaching me when inside it than if I was standing on the shore. But even encased in my coccoon of painted tin, I am strangely refreshed and enlivened by their company. I watch the families moving over the surface of the water, and for a while I am drawn into their little society with all its complexity and violence and beauty.  I take photos. Lots of photos. 

Then I return home. Edit the pictures. And post some on Facebook. 


Comments

Elaine Dent said…
"Return...edit...post." And we who weren't there are glad you did. In spite of the hazards of social media to our souls, your photos of swans are redemptive.
Greg said…
Lovely photos Kelvin. Keep them coming !

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old