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

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

“The African Jacana (Actophilornis africanus) walks on lily pads and floating vegetation, distributing its weight across toes that reach seven centimetres in length. The author had noted this as remarkable and moved on. He is returning to it. The jacana is polyandrous: one female holds a territory containing two to four males, mates with all of them, and delegates the entirety of the parental work — nest-building, incubation, chick-rearing — to those males. When threatened, the male carries the chicks under his wings. The chick’s body is completely hidden. Only the legs are visible, dangling below the male’s wing, still and small and entirely specific. The author watched a male walking through shallow water with additional legs appearing to emerge from beneath his wing and wrote, for approximately thirty seconds, a very confused field note before understanding what he was looking at.”

He thought it was an injury at first.

The bird was moving through the shallow edges of the pan, and beneath its left wing, extending downward, were legs. Small legs. Definitely there. Moving slightly, in the manner of legs that belonged to something with an opinion about being carried.

He wrote: Jacana. Adult male. Apparent injury or growth beneath left wing. Investigating.

The legs beneath the wing moved.

He put the field glasses on properly. Under the wing — the specific space between the folded wing and the body — a chick. One chick, body invisible, tucked completely under the wing, only the legs and feet hanging down. The male walking across the pan with the chick carried in the enclosed space beneath his wing, legs dangling, the whole arrangement so precisely engineered that the male appeared to have simply grown additional legs as a secondary feature.

He looked at the field note: apparent injury or growth.

He crossed it out.

He wrote: Male carrying chick beneath wing. Body completely concealed. Only legs visible. Not an injury. A child.

He read the taxonomy material that afternoon.

Polyandry — the female holds the territory, the males inhabit it, the female mates with all of them, the males build the nest, incubate the eggs, raise the chicks, and carry them beneath their wings in emergency. He read this once and then read it again and then looked out at the pan where the male was still moving through the shallows with the chick he was carrying on this particular afternoon.

The pan smelled of warm water and water-lily and the specific faintly vegetable smell of shallow African water in the afternoon heat. A female jacana was at the territory boundary, calling, defending against another female. The male was doing what the male did.

“The female holds the territory,” he said to Cetshwayo.

“Yes.”

“And the males —”