Laurens Van Der Post, The Heart of the Hunter: Customs and Myths of the African Bushman

People often asked him which of all the creatures encountered in his many years as a hunter and dweller, in far-away places of Africa, he found most impressive. Always he answered that it would have to be a bird of some kind. This never failed to surprise them, because people are apt to be dazzled by physical power, size, frightfulness, and they expected him to say an elephant, lion, buffalo or some other imposing animal. But he stuck to his answer; there was nothing more wonderful in Africa than its birds. I asked why precisely. He paused and drew a circle with his finger in the red sand in front of him before saying that it was for many reasons, but in the first place because birds flew. He said it in such a way that I felt I had never before experienced fully the wonder of birds flying.

I waited silently for him to find the next link in his chain of thought. In the second place, he remarked, because birds sang. He himself loved all natural sounds in the bush and the desert, but he had to admit none equaled the sounds of birds. It was as if the sky made music in their throats and one could hear the sun rise and set, the night fall and the first stars come out in their voices. Other animals were condemned to make only such noises as they must, but birds seemed free to utter the sounds they wanted to, to shape them at will and invent new ones to express all the emotions of living matter released on wings from its own dead weight. He knew of nothing so beautiful as the sight of a bird utterly abandoned to its song, every bit of its being surrendered to the music, the tip of the tiniest feather trembling like a tuning fork with sound. Sometimes too, birds danced to their own music. And they not only sang. They also conversed. There appeared to be little they could not convey to one another by sound. He himself had always listened with the greatest care to bird sound and never ceased to marvel at the variety of intelligence it conveyed to him.

Stranger still was their capacity of being aware of things before they happened. This was positively amazing. When the great earth tremor shook the northern Kalahari some years before, Ben was travelling with a herd of cattle along the fringes of the Okovango swamp. One day he was watching some old-fashioned storks, sacred ibis and giant herons along the edges of a stream. Suddenly the birds stopped feeding, looked uneasily about them, and then all at once took to their wings as if obedient to a single command. They rose quickly in the air and began wheeling over the river, making the strangest sounds. The sound had not fallen long on the still air before the ground under his feet started to shake, the cattle to below and run, and as far as his eyes could see the banks of the stream began to break away from the bush, as if sliced from it by a knife, and to collapse into the water. He had no doubt the birds knew what was coming, and he made a careful note of their behavior and the sound they uttered.

Even more wonderful, however, was their beauty.  Color, for instance, lovely as it was in most animals, served the latter only for camouflage. But with birds it was much more. Of all the creatures, none dressed so well as the birds of Africa.  They had summer and winter dresses, special silks for making love, coats and skirts for travel, and more practical clothes that did not show the dirt and wear and tear of domestic use. Even the soberest ones among them, which went about the country austere as elders of the Dutch Reformed Church collecting from parsimonious congregations on Sunday mornings--the old-fashioned storks in black and white, or the secretary birds with their stiff starched fronts and frock coats--their dress was always of an impeccable taste.

...Finally there was their quality of courage. When one considered what tender, small, delicate and defenseless things most birds were, they were perhaps the bravest creatures in the world. He had seen far more moving instances of the courage of the birds of Africa than could possibly relate, but he would mention only one of the most common -- birds defending their nests against snakes. On those occasions they had a rallying cry, which was a mixture of faith and courage just keeping ahead of despair and fear. It would draw birds from all around to the point of danger, and the recklessness with which one little one feathered body after another would hurl itself at the head of a snake, beating with its wings and shrieking its Valkyrian cry, had to be seen to be believed. Ben once saw a black mamba driven dazed out of a tree by only a score or so of resolute little birds. The mamba, which he killed, measured close on ten feet, and this snake is itself a creature of fiery outage and determination. No, all in all, he had no doubt that birds were the most wonderful of all living things.