return of the tweeters

the birds returned to nest in our plants // mar – apr ’11

01 : mother bird that flies out to peck at you if you come too near
02: mother bird out for lunch
03: hatchlings
04: pin feathers

After chatting to our neighbours, we discovered the bird-parents had 2 nests. Talk about diversifying your risks and multi-tasking.

One night, we found only one chick in the nest, while the other one was strangled in the branches a few centimeters away from the next.   We kept watch till midnight, but the mother bird didn’t come back to roost. Cue the humans panicking. We thought she had abandoned her chick, like the other mother bird abandoned her eggs last year when there was a threat. There we were wondering at 1am what to feed it and how to keep it warm in the windy night, googling away like mad for the possibilities. In the end, we fed it mashed up bread mixed with water and honey with a chopstick and nestled a cotton cloth around it.

Thankfully, the mother bird came back the next day. I think my whole family teared.

Not so thankfully, I found out from my British & Australian colleagues the next day that the stronger sibling usually pushes the weaker sibling out of the nest. Survival of the fittest. So, the victim we were fretting over, was actually the culprit. Ouch, reality check, right there.

[school] toy soldiers

Bought a $2.40 pack of toy soldiers to shoot for the poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. It’s one of the typographic projects for school. Everyone chooses their own poem to layout in a square booklet, complete with images. Decided to try out some shots first, borrowing  Jonny’s camera (a Panasonic DMC-GF1) which is a true-blue beauty. Unfortunately, halfway through I had to return it, so hello again, my tiny Canon Ixus!

Since I obviously have no lightbox, no DSLR and no proper equiment in my house, I settled for A3 size paper filched from my mother (who’s a kindergarten teacher, so she has a lot of barang-barang), 2 old mooncake boxes and masking tape. As well as kept praying for the sun to keep shining. Haha. Obviously some of the colour/clarity/lighting differed in the end, but I guess they’ll have to do for now.

While I was buying the toy soldiers, I was partially appalled/partially resigned to the mercenary phenomenon that is commercialization.

These weren’t just plain green soldiers, these were American soldiers. There were also packs of Japanese soldiers with their ear-flap hats, Germans soldiers with Nazi uniforms (i think?), British soldiers and their water-cans (they would have been more historically accurate for the poem, and they had the best uniforms, but they were coloured dune…who would want dirty yellow soldiers?), etc. The faces were modeled differently too. I believe the Germans had mustaches.

Whatever the case, why give them races? Why teach children how to choose different nations to fight with one another. Couldn’t the manufacturers be satisfied with Army A fighting with Army B,  or Army Red vs Army Blue?

I know it’s probably  to differentiate one’s generic product for better sales, but I don’t know….it just got me thinking. I wonder whether we can boil most prejudices we know down to a toy form. Like Barbies or trucks vs cooking sets.