Outside my office window are two nectar feeders. They’re bright, shaped like an orange dome, perhaps to mimic the appearance of a flower- although of that I’m not quite sure. There are no flowers that look like that round here.
Every day, I unhook the feeders from their branches, carry their slightly sticky outsides all the way down to the kitchen.
Can you open the door? I shout out to my boys, hoping they’re lurking somewhere roundabout inside.
Once there, I unscrew the top, separate it out from the rounded bottom base. I take the big bag of sugar, pour 1/3 of a cup, or something close, inside. Add the slightly warm-ish water. A shake round to dissolve it.
A tap. One time, two times, maybe three, to activate the feeding holes, whose simple, plastic, brightly coloured bits become stuck with my taking of the top away from bottom.
And then, I pick them up, have them hanging at my sides, sloshing, left, slosh, right, slosh, make my way back up the path.
I reach, hang them high, as far up in the branches as it’s possible to go. The limbs of my arms, as far as they can reach.
My Tūī come.
One,
two,
sometimes
three or four.
Yesterday, I listened to a program on the radio that spoke about the Tūī. The person who was talking said in years gone by it was not unusual to see flocks of fifty or sixty Tūī flying over.
Fifty or sixty Tūī.
Imagine that.
A friend dropped by to visit just the other day and saw my tree. Sat with me in my office that looks out towards the feeders. We saw two.
You have a lot of Tūī here, I heard her say.
The collective noun for the Tūī is an ecstasy.
An ecstasy of Tūī.
I thought about, looked up the collective noun for us, the collective noun for humans.
A group. A committee. A gathering. A meeting.
Perhaps, this is the point where we could turn things back around.
A compassion,
a caring,
a tenderness,
a protection,
a wilderness,
of humans.
