Hadeda Hiatus

I was sitting reading the paper one late afternoon when a couple of hadedas flew in and made a clumsy landing on the lawn. Soon joined by two more, they started ambling in a slow procession, poking the grass with their large bills.

There’d been a rain shower the night before and the ground was nice and soft. Clearly there were rich pickings: every second prod evoked something juicy that was thrown back into gaping throats. It was a peaceful scene – but it wouldn’t last.

Whoever coined the phrase “let sleeping dogs lie”? As anyone with any sense knows, sleeping dogs keep their ears and eyes in standby mode and wake whenever anything vaguely exciting appears to be about to happen. Unless, of course, they’re about to be thrown out of the house for the night, in which case they pretend to be dead to the world.

At all other times, however, they react to triggers that they know promise reward – such as the food cupboard being opened or hiking boots appearing.

Or hadedas on the lawn. With no warning, there was a sudden explosion from the dog cushions under the stairs and a wild scrabbling of paws on the tiles. Bursting out the sliding door onto the patio, Rhea dashed across the lawn. Great brown birds scattered in all directions, raucously shouting “hah-dee-dah, hah-dee-dah”.

Caught up in the thrill of the chase, Rhea overran the edge of the lawn and collected herself rather ungracefully in the flower beds. Then she looked back over her shoulder and realised that the hadedas had merely flown up into the air and landed back on the lawn behind her. She ran back up the lawn, scattering them once more.

But the hadedas had played this game too often and now they’d landed back on the lawn further down. The dog joined me in the lounge, gathering the remnants of her ridgeback pride, and clunked herself down on the floor. Facing the lawn, she lay with her face on her paws, feigning indifference.

She was watching, however, and soon the temptation once more became too much and she exploded out the door to resume the chase. Sluggishly, they rose up from the lawn, leaving it almost to the last minute, wheeled round and landed again. Head down, Rhea ran at them, again and again. Finally, the hadedas had had enough and disappeared over the roof. Rhea retired to her cushion in triumph.

A few minutes later, Siegie came home. “There are a whole load of hadedas round the front,” he told me.

Rhea and I both knew the reason why. But hers was a fleeting victory: the hadedas would be back on the lawn and she’d have to start hounding them all over again.