From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Blue Crane (Anthropoides paradiseus) is South Africa’s national bird. There are approximately twenty-six thousand left. The author had been noting it in passing — common agricultural bird, open grassland — and had not previously opened a dedicated page. He has opened one now. The primary causes of population decline: deliberate poisoning by farmers who regard the crane as a crop pest; accidental poisoning through treated grain and agricultural chemicals; collision with power lines; loss of natural grassland to agriculture. The elongated secondary wing feathers trail on the ground and are the bird’s most distinctive feature. In the tradition of the amaXhosa and other southern African peoples, the crane tail feather was the mark of distinction awarded to warriors of recognised courage — the feather was earned, not inherited, not purchased. The author has been walking past South Africa’s national bird, in a field, in the Karoo, for twenty years.”

He almost didn’t stop.

He had been making good time on the morning circuit — the standard north-south route across the open Karoo grassland, the air smelling of the specific dryness that the Karoo achieves before the mid-morning heat, a smell like stone and dry grass and the particular absence of moisture that this landscape has decided is sufficient — and the cranes were in the ploughed field at the circuit’s western edge. He had noted them. He had kept walking.

Cetshwayo had stopped.

The Colonel turned. Cetshwayo was looking at the cranes, not at the Colonel, with the quality of attention he brought to things that were worth attending to. The Colonel came back and stood beside him and looked at the cranes and tried to understand what Cetshwayo was looking at.

Two birds. Blue-grey — the blue that the name promised, more subtle than the word suggested, a blue-grey that in the morning light was the colour of distances. The elongated wing feathers trailed on the ploughed earth. They were moving slowly through the furrows, heads down, attending to the field’s available food with the methodical quality of large birds that do not hurry because they are already where they need to be.

“The feather,” Cetshwayo said.

“Which feather?”

“The crane feather.”

The Colonel looked at the elongated feathers trailing in the earth.

“What about it?”

“The warriors wore it,” Cetshwayo said. “The ones who had earned it.”

He opened the dedicated page that evening.

He had written common agricultural bird, open grassland in the margin of the secretary bird entry, which was the last time the crane had appeared in his notes, and the margin notation had been the total of his attention to the species across twenty years of field work. He read it back now with the quality of someone reading their own work and finding it insufficient.

He did the arithmetic.