24. Birds in culture
A Visit to Robben Island by James A. Harrison
Armed with our cardboard boxes and gloves we arrive
with the ex-prison-now-museum staff, on a big white ferry.
We scientists, of European extraction, will capture
abandoned African Penguin chicks and transport them
to the mainland to be hand-reared and later released
to bolster their species’ declining population.
(Their parents are growing new feathers on the beach.)
Adult penguins stand in scruffy crowds, their old feathers
clogging the rock pools. A European Fallow Deer dashes
away in zigzag fright. Coveys of Asian Chukar Partridge
scuttle beneath the dense Rooikrans (an Australian Acacia
with an Afrikaans name). The invading bush hides ruins
of military installations, and unexplained circles of stones –
an archaeology of forgotten purposes, too young and too old for interest.
Somewhere a Peacock (from India) shouts its wild cry,
for its own purposes. The heat bears down as we search.
Deep concrete bunkers here and there, like pitfalls in the bush.
I chase a chick past a concrete amphitheatre with huge rusting bolts
protruding in a neat circle, like a fossilized dinosaur birthday cake –
it’s a World War II gun emplacement, constructed for strength
and permanence, abandoned now, and quite useless.
Back on the quay, a pretty young student rehydrates a chick,
by force. She mothers it with sweet words and a deft plastic tube
down the throat. Guides meet the ferries and the jostling, jabbering
tourists, so varied you almost want to sort them, to make things neater.
They are shepherded to jail and Madiba’s cell. They want
to suffer, for a minute or two.
The boxed penguins wait with the tourists – who get preference –
to board for Cape Town. We pull away from the shore.
On the island, empty watchtowers watch the breakers breaking
where they broke before. Behind their stone backs, the island
continues its subversion. The ferry passes groups of penguins
with new feathers, floating like ducks on the sea.
