The date : December 31 is eagerly anticipated! I can’t begin to welcome but, perhaps I cannot celebrate the New Year, 2018 unless it is over. I am sure that 2017 was good in one aspect, my family made it through. There were serious health problems of family members, and one of my daughters who lives abroad survived through those horrific fires in southern California. She had to evacuate her home in Santa Barbara City, as fires were surrounding the area nearby. I am grateful to God for all HIS blessings, protection and mercy.
2017 is over in a few hours, and though I am feeling apprehensive about certain circumstances, being sad about these problems that will carry over into the new year is not a good thing. Crying over spilt milk is not something I do. I am just happy me and my family made it through alive, and everyone is doing good.
I do want to mention and honor an animal friend that passed on.... I want to pay my respects, by remembering a beautiful wild and intelligent, kingfisher, named Rambo, that lived on a mango tree in the area where my garden is located. I remember that Rambo always greeted me when I would stroll about at my garden. He recently passed on around October, and my farm hand showed me his lifeless body, with his bright red and incandescent blue coloured feathers still beaming. He was found lying beside the chair I normally sit in to watch him perch on the metal bars of the horse stables.
I will miss him very much like all those animal friends that have passed on, but he like them are part of the good memories I have.
The day I met Rambo, he was a curious little kingfisher, about 12 years ago, when I started a lotus pond at the south end of my garden. I placed the lotus plant in a rubber pot, and set it in the center of the pond. Then quite unknowingly, I added tiny fingerling guppies to keep the water clean of mosquito larvae and other falling insects. I noticed on one of the bamboo plants near the pond, a small, juvenile kingfisher. His parents went fishing in the nearby creek. He did not go with the others of his kind to the other side of the creek. Instead, he watched me. He was like most birds, he trying to understand what I was doing. He would come closer, flying from bush to the bamboo, then stop, cock his head towards me. He was curious as to why I carried a transparent plastic bag filled about 30 tiny guppies floating in air and water. He knew these tiny creatures were fish by their shape and movement. My workers filled the pond with water, and laid the lotus plants in the center. I then lowered the bag of guppies and set them free to swim about, sheltered from the heat by the lotus leaves, and all the fish hid under rocks I provided for them at the bottom of the pond.
Next day, I went to see how the lotus pond was coming along. I heard the piercing shriek coming from the top of my water tank, about 15 feet high, on the northwestern side of the property. I looked up to see the kingfisher poised with wings slightly open to take in the breeze, then it dived down directly towards the ground, picking up an earthworm that made it up from the shallow depths of the compost pile to get air. Well, Rambo swooped up his morning meal, and flew right back up to enjoy his breakfast on top of the water tank grid. He was eyeing the pond, but he knew that I was busy with installing the fixtures and arranging other plants within the perimeter of the pond. Rambo then disappeared into the forest, but he knew there were delicious treats hiding in the soft, damp bedding of the horse stables.
I saw Rambo flying up to the coconut tree beside the stables, and the sun was rising directly over the stables, and squinting, I saw the flash of his stunning, glossy blue wings as he landed on the metal fence of the horse stables. He had swallowed the earthworm earlier that was longer than his entire body, and now he was hungry again. Perhaps he flew away into the fruit trees of my neighbour Magno, and had a family to share his meal? I wasn't sure how much a kingfisher can eat, but a few minutes later, Rambo cocked his head, and was eyeing something on the grounds of the stables. The horses ignored him, like the chickens that were rummaging through the sawdust which was the bedding for the horses, searching for the moth larvae from the giant Atlas moth. The adult moth dies within a week of its life, right after laying eggs that will hatch into caterpillars and grow about 6 inches long. These caterpillars eat the sawdust soaked in the urine of the horses, and they will wiggle out, much to their peril to be seen by predators like Rambo. The caterpillars will live for about as long as they can eat enough to begin to form a chrysalis but won’t emerge at fully formed moths for up to a year. These Atlas moth larvae are easy prey for hungry chickens, and birds that know where to look! Rambo was peeking with his keen eyes on any movement on the sawdust, then seeing the white head of the larvae pop out, he would plunge into the horse bedding, yanking out a very fat caterpillar, clamp it with his beak, then fly off again to the mango tree to eat his meal.
Rambo was aloof to everyone, but he seemed to be an observer of my farm, fascinated that a human like myself actually gave him his very own pond. He would wait for me to arrive and my workers would point at him sitting by the rails of my stables, watching me, and I would sit on the terrace and enjoy seeing him hunt and fly about.
He laid claim to my lotus pond. I was very upset to know that Rambo finished off all the guppies by the end of the month. I did not expect what came next. Rambo had plans for my lotus pond. This intelligent bird amazingly had his own ideas how to use the pond, he would dive in the creek across my garden's south walls, and pluck out a fish from the water. I first observed him flying overhead, and noticed he dropped something into the lotus pond. I did not know why he was doing this about three times that day. I thought, the fish must have accidentally fallen from his beak. Then it became apparent that he deliberately dislodged the fish from his beak and drop it alive into the lotus pond. He was flying up to the water tank grid, and then to the bamboo near the pond to watch the stunned tiny fish fingerlings swim about. He would then disappear into the forest, then come back, only to watch my pond from the safety of the water tank. Eventually, I figured out, Rambo was intelligent enough to understand that his deposits into the lotus pond of fish, was like stocking his very own refrigerator of food, he intended to save for a future date!
Rambo was with me for 12 years, and he continued to stock the pond with his favorite fish. Some even grew about 8 inches long, and matured, to spawn and produced more fingerlings. Rambo would eat the fingerlings, and leave the adults to continue to breed, and lay eggs beneath the rocks. I enjoyed seeing him, swoop down, for grasshoppers, beetles, and a variety of insects, even small snakes. Years passed, and one day, I got the bad news. Rambo's passing was very noticeable. I stopped hearing that familiar shriek that I had come to relay on as a greeting from an animal friend, that I had come to know and love. I knew something bad had happened to him, but my workers said, it was early morning, and they found his remains by my chair. No sign of foul play from the cats, or my dogs. He was 12 years old or more...it was his time.
So, this is one of the many stories of my experiences in my garden. I hope to write more, as I can , because time is cruel, when those animals we have befriended leave us. I can remember all my animals, and the people who made this garden a lovely place to come and enjoy the vanishing countryside. My farm has become my sanctuary, and my place of refuge from the fast enroaching, metropolitan sprawl of Manila.
