the-junglequeen

Sparky was soon to learn that if a bird is minded to adopt a human for a mother, he faces a number of problems.  How much food does he require and how often?  And what kind of food is best?    A small bird's natural mother knows how to provide him with exactly what he needs.  Her experience is older than the time of man, and she makes no mistakes.

A young bird with a human mother needs two things: she must have time and patience, and he needs a cast-iron constitution and a powerful will to survive.

Inside the one-room cottage, Sparky found just what he needed : a young woman with a love of animals, on holiday at home with her parents.

For the first few days, Sparky lived in an ice-cream container nest.  He started off on buckwheat and milk porridge, supplemented as time went on with birdseed, grit, insects and chopped worms from the garden.  

Whether or not the food was ideal, Sparky was trouble-free, which says a lot for his constitution and survival instincts.

After a day or two, he graduated to a home on the windowsill – a wooden nail box with top and bottom removed.  This gave him wall-to-wall windows on one side and the open grille of a wire cake-rack on the other.  So he had complete views on both sides, and his widow was well shaded by the eaves of the cottage.

As he grew, he came to love the view up the hill to the bush and the mighty rock.  In front of his window, the pasture dropped away to a small valley bowl with giant totara trees and a quiet pond fringed with tree ferns.  The place had beauty and peace – and a great sense of power and belonging.  Sparky took it all in, and he absorbed a love of it from the people who nurtured him.   

In his fall, Sparky had broken his right leg, so he couldn't put his right foot on the ground properly.  Undeterred, he learned to balance himself and move around on his good leg.  He wasn't fast, and at times he used the joint of his right leg to prop himself. But he could get around inside the cottage.  Before long he was able to fly around in the small space, too.  Sparky had "made it" through the first big adventure of his life.

Things settled down to an enjoyable lifestyle, but as ever, change was inevitable. At the end of summer holidays, his adopted mother had to return to her own home in the big city.  

There was no question of Sparky continuing his life in the cottage – there was too much work to be done there, building a proper house.  Putting him into the wild as a youngster with a broken leg was also unthinkable. The only option was for him to go home with mother – over 600 miles to the capital city in Wellington.  It is hard to imagine a bigger change in lifestyle.

Sparky's little house was shipped down to the big city in advance.  Mother was travelling by air – and Sparky would have to go by air too. The main worry was how to ship him, how to avoid tangling with 'the authorities' and getting him banned from flying or confiscated.  That didn't bear thinking about.

In the end, Sparky travelled incognito in his ice-cream container tucked under his mother's arm.

There was a change of flights at Auckland, and for a minute or two he was placed on the counter at the airport check-in. - the most dangerous moment of all.  No doubt his innate wisdom kept him silent - or was it a determination not to be impounded in the sprawling City of Sails?  

Either way, he went undetected and travelled the journey from one end of the island to the other - a 600 mile journey from tranquillity to 'civilisation'.  

Chapter 1 here - the-junglequeen.deviantart.com…

Down below the big rock in a totara tree the sparrows had built a nest. Sparky was born there one bright evening in early summer, and spent the first days of his life with his brothers and sisters in the warm shelter of dry grass and feathers that his parents had made.

All the others were quite happy to settle down and close their eyes after meals. They soon fell asleep, rocked by the gentle movement of the branches. Sparky however, once he was a few days old, began to notice things around him. He watched as his parents came and went, and he saw the changing patterns of the leaves against the blue sky, which seemed ever so far away. He could hear sounds - birds calling mainly, but sometimes sounds that he couldn't understand.

His curiosity grew daily. He wanted to know what was out there, beyond the rim of the nest and the branch where his parents landed when they came with food. Looking up at the changing skies and the stars that twinkled through the leaves at night, he wondered ...

"It must be an exciting world out there," he thought. "I want to go and find out for myself."

Sparky didn't know it, but his curious, inquisitive, enquiring mind was going to lead him on a path very different from his brothers and sisters. Exploring was going to be his passion; 'finding out' would be the guiding star to lead him into some great adventures. On this first occasion though as he followed his impulse, he was unaware of anything but the call of the big world outside his safe haven.

He struggled to pull himself up to the rim of the nest, never thinking that it was far to early in life to venture out. He had no feathers yet, and he certainly couldn't fly. Under normal circumstances this adventure would have had an abrupt ending.

But the heavens smiled upon him.  His home tree, standing as it did in the shadow of Orotere, was no ordinary tree : the branches that sheltered his home nest also sheltered a small A-frame cottage.  And so it was that Sparky's fall was broken.

Was it divine intervention?  In such a spot, one would like to think so.  The passing of time has not diminished the presence of that stern mystery brooding on the hilltop.  Even the torrential rains, which at times in summer turn the hillside's parched gullies into raging torrents, seem to be a fitting manifestation of the mountain's power.  

The night before Sparky's adventure, a rainstorm had drenched the hill and filled a bowl of berries left lying outdoors.  Floating on top of the water, they were just soft enough to make a comfortable landing pad.  In a sense, Sparky's timing and aim were perfect.

Nights can be cold though, even in the Far North.  How long can such a tiny bird without food and body covering survive the cold night air?  How long had he been there when dusk closed in and the tui said his last goodnight?

The great hill was drawing on its night mantle and soon there would be nothing left but the stars for company.

But wait – not everyone was settled for the night.  Coming up the hill from working on his land, the man from the cottage paused to wash his hands at the outside tap.  What made him glance down at the bowl on the ground nearby?  With the evening light now almost gone, it is a wonder he saw the little bird lying there.

Chapter 1 here - the-junglequeen.deviantart.com…

I started writing this book back about 1980, after I lost a young sparrow I'd been rearing.  It was a labor of love, but the story had ended so abruptly that at the time, still grieving, I couldn't see how to finish the writing.  

I picked it up again in 2006, inspired by the concept that it was over to me to give the book whatever ending I wanted.  The writing got completed (provisionally, anyway), and then the whole thing was sidelined again because I didn't have time to do illustrations right then and there.

Now I've illustrated 'Taketakerau The Millennium Tree' taketakerau.com/ , I feel ready to take this on, so I'm going to post a few chapters of it with a request for Comments Please!  I apologize that this is a New Zealand oriented book, but the setting for the story is my own home property - I hope you enjoy it nonetheless!  The start of the book is based on actual events

BOOK TEASER:

What price a sparrow?  Adaptable and courageous, Sparky - a commonplace little sparrow - steps out of his appointed niche, lives his own life, survives beyond all the odds, and finds adventure and his true home among the native birds and animals of Aotearoa New Zealand.

CHAPTER ONE:

Come with me to the Far North of Aotearoa New Zealand.   Travel back in time and picture the country as a narrow slice of land - the tail of Maui's great fish – sliding up through the centuries from the twisting seabed of the South Pacific plate.

As the land rose, the earth's core fires leaped out through its surface, leaving great fingers of earth-mother rock embedded in the silt.  Hundreds of centuries passed and these volcanic remnants were finally laid bare, as ice, rain, wind and wave eroded the softer rock around them.

Such is the history of one small, commanding pinnacle standing alone, reaching skyward over the rolling bush-clad hills.  The Polynesian immigrants called it Orotere - 'Swift Echo'.  They invested it with the protective mantle of tapu and the sacred bones of princes were laid to rest in the limestone vaults deep beneath its naked rock face. The slopes below, scattered with mighty boulders, pitted with natural mantraps, were hallowed ground.

In centuries gone by, this whole land of Aotearoa was cloaked in virgin forest, from below the mountains right down through the valleys to the ocean shores.  It was the natural home of countless birds and reptiles large and small – a unique fragment of land with its unique inhabitants, broken off from the great primeval continent of Gondwana.   Before the arrival of man there were no foreign predators to disturb the balance of this natural Eden.

With the coming of men from Polynesia and then from Europe, the land was changed forever. Sadly. far too much of the surrounding forest, once so proud, was burnt for cultivation or shipped for spars and reduced to pasture.     

But because of its sacredness, Orotere was spared.  It still retains its leafy mantle, its mana, and much of its tapu even today.

To the north lies the Valley of the Twelve Apostles, and beyond it, the deep, secret harbour of Whangaroa with its hidden channel.   To the east, the land dips sharply to plunge into the Pacific Ocean - Moana Nui, the big sea - at the golden, curving beach of Matauri.     To the west, hills roll and stretch away to the fringes of the mighty forest remnant,  the Puketi, where kauri giants may mercifully still slumber through the hot, hazy summers and drink their fill in the winter's damp.

This area was named Kukuparere - Flying Pigeon - after one of its inhabitants, the native pigeon or kereru.   According to legend, all of Aotearoa's kereru originated from here.   Be that as it may. kereru survivors still fly on the slopes of Orotere today, though much reduced in numbers :   in autumn, heavy with forest fruits, they dive and stall, swoop and soar in the evening light around its rock face.

As night gathers, the day's last call is from the tui – the earliest and latest bird. Then when darkness comes even he falls silent, and Orotere belongs to the night-loving kiwi and ruru, the native owl. Their voices rustle its dark mantle and echo its history more truly than any other bird.  

This place has seen the kiwi, the kereru, the tui, the native owl, possibly the huia, now extinct; almost certainly the kokako, now endangered.     These were historic birds in a historic place.   

Sparky was not one of them.  

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Thanks to clippercarrillo for encouraging me to do this - clippercarrillo.deviantart.com…

Patricia

Though I love writing, I've made a pact with myself not to let it get in the way of the artworks.  So I don't plan on writing heaps.

Just wanted to put up a review of the book "Taketakerau The Millennium Tree", the 36 illustrations for which have occupied my time for the last 12 months :
taketakerau.com/images/BayWeek…

And I'll add a photo of one of the book spreads, as it came from the printing company in Singapore:
taketakerau.com/images/taketak…


Patricia