composition:BIRDS

Composition

Finally I find a little free time to write this composition about BIRDS
I was thinking about this subject a lot, without any inspiration…. Then at this season of the year I have a lot of Italian student’s groups that make me very tired and nervous, because they don’t have any interest and are very talkative….
And when I arrive at home I have no feel like going to write.

Long time ago when I get to the EOI, I remember we have to read “ MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS” by Gerald Durrell… It was a book that I like a lot, really, I enjoyed it very very much , then in my own I read “BIRDS, BEAST AND OTHER ANIMALS”….
Under a literary point of view, they aren’t literary books, or scientific ones, they are books without any plot. The writer wrote his experiences when hi was a child and lived in Corfu (Greece), his particular experiences one after another without continuity. The reading of the books isn’t easy, the vocabulary is a bit complicated al the beginning, because is full of animal nouns that I didn’t know beforehand.
To my mind, there aren’t books about animals only, because besides the animal stories, there are beautiful descriptions of the Greek countryside. If you have time, I recommended you to read, at least one of the books
But….I don’t forget that subject of the composition is about birds….and why I write to you this introduction….Because I remember that when we talked about the books at class, all the people look very surprised at me, when I explained that I had a lot of birds at home….
What??? Yes, a lot of bird, perhaps fifty or more. Why????
Well, I am country girl, when I was a child at home, we have a lot of animals; not cats or dogs, as usually, rabbits, pigs, chicken, ducks, goats….
So, forty years ago, Sant Just, my village, seemed very far from Barcelona, it was a country village and a lot of families live in a single house with a vegetable garden, with fruit trees and grow animals…in order to eat them ( the other students didn’t believe me…)
My father made a big cage ( so big that it was possible to go inside) to grew canaries and other little birds, like goldfinches and greenfinches….He put there a death Christmas tree and birds had a lot of space to fly… In spring he put nests in a special wood place and it was very interesting to look how the every male choose his female and they stayed together in the nest, they got eggs ( thee or four per couple) and then the little birds born….a bird per day… at the beginning they were very awful without feathers, how they grew, day by day, then how the parents feet them…with a special meet that my father put just for them… how the parents clean the nest, how they tried to fly…. Sometimes ants went to the nest and ate the little birds….and sometimes someone death.
When my father dead, my husband tried to follow this hobby for several years, and my children had the opportunity to live these special experiences….
I remember that when my old son started to school, one day his teacher wanted to speak with me, because he was very worried with my son, because he had a very strange ideas, so, he explained that at home he had a bid cage of birds that it was possible to go inside, to fly with the birds, and that this kind of fantasies were no normal in a boy of his age, and she suggested to me to sent my son to the psychologist…..….Do you imagine the face of this teacher when I explained l to hem that it was true. , that t in spite to live near Barcelona we are a country family….and we have this kind of cage at home……

And now a second history about birds ( je je)
Sometimes tourist are like children and they make me a lot of crazy questions. One of these questions are put me in the Park Guell… I am talking about Gaudi and his ideas and that the park for Gaudi has to be a Holiday complex and bla, bla, bla…. And the question arrives
-Excuse me???? What king of birds are these????
-yes, just a minute, please….
Because nowadays there are a lot of green parrots, living on their own, in the Park Guell and in a lot of gardens of Barcelona. The history of these parrots is very nice…
This king of birds don’t belong to our fauna, they came from Brazil.
Around thirty years ago these birds, that they have the same size of a pigeon, and a beautiful green colour, where sold like pets , they were cheap, and a lot of children received them as a present with a special cage and food and so on….but they are very “talkative” and they make a nasty noise all the time….at the beginning they are beautiful and funny….but some weeks after, the noise was so nasty that was impossible to live with them at home….and people have a lot oh problems with the neighbours….and the easy solution was to open the cage and the bird flies away….
As the weather in Barcelona is warm and we have a lot of palms threes. They have the possibility to make their nests inside the palm threes and eat the dates…so, they had colonized our gardens and they had found a new habitat…
it is possible to look at them, everywhere in town…They can fly a lot. and when the palm trees have no fruits, they can eat almonds, tomatoes and other fruits that find in the vegetable gardens in the Llobregat Delta….so,, they are starting to be a problem for the Delta country families….
Beautiful history….that sometimes interest the tourist most that the Gaudi constructions…

Montsrerat Rajadell.-