Arthur & Martha & the white goose

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If someone told me this story, I would most likely dismiss it as fanciful bullshit - if not for the fact that I lived it myself.

It’s a story about a pair of Woolly-Necked Storks that arrived, completely out of the blue, in our front yard in Westville, Durban, one day.

The female stork was slightly smaller than the male. Otherwise, they were identical. You could tell them apart when they were together, but when they were apart, you couldn’t tell who was, who?  Pun intended.

Hence, I named them Arthur and Martha.

They were distinctly different characters, though. We learned to distinguish them by their mannerisms.

Arthur was the cocky, inquisitive one. Martha was more reserved, always keeping a safe distance.
We scattered broken pieces of bread on the front lawn for our regular flock of Egyptian Ibis’. Hadedas, as they are called locally.

Hadedas are common around here. They’re relatively domesticated, and if you feed them, they quickly multiply and shit everywhere. Noisy bastards too. I’m not particularly fond of them.
Arthur chased them and pinched the bread.

We also had plenty of small birds - sparrows, wild yellow canaries, weaver birds, and a few red bishops. Fights regularly broke out around the overcrowded bird feeder, so we added another... and another... and another.

Eventually, we had a tree full of feeders and swarms of chirpy, happy little birds.

A lone brown African Hammerhead made regular pit stops at the pool. A pied kingfisher perched on a branch in the front yard, hunting worms and whatever else it could find in the grass. A purple-crested lourie frequented the same tree - a strikingly beautiful bird with an equally beautiful call, serenading a potential mate somewhere in the distance.

We had two overnight veranda-dwellers: a small spurfowl that befriended me when I started leaving a bowl of special seeds the other birds couldn’t find, and an Egyptian goose that swam in the pool and slept at the far end of the veranda at night.

Of course, there was also a sizeable contingent of local nuisance birds - Indian mynas, red-winged starlings, pigeons and doves. Pesky things.

And birds of prey too—brown kites and various species of African eagles gliding along the coastal thermals and making regular fly-bys for a quick takeaway. 

Hell, we had a decent private bird sanctuary going. All to ourselves…

Good times. An enjoyable part of our lives.
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​Arthur and Martha, being the largest birds around, had no natural enemies.

They reigned supreme. Spoilt buggers.

Raw lean beef mince became their staple diet. They loved it.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

They overnighted on top of a T-shaped telephone pole next to our property, dropped in for breakfast, flew off, returned for lunch, disappeared again, and came back for their late-afternoon snack before retiring to the pole for the night.
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​Arthur was an impatient fella with a bad attitude.

When the mince was late, he’d get pissed off. He chased the other birds around the garden. Attacked the pot plants. Pulled on the curtains. Vandalised the place.

When my wife Danielle eventually arrived with their plate of mince, Arthur would be pecking at it before she’d even put it down. Martha would come sprinting from the far side of the pool in long strides, leaning into corners like a MotoGP rider on the opening lap.

Every feeding was entertainment.

Of all the birds, the storks were the ones who kept us entertained the most. They were real characters. My friends found it hard to believe the stories I told until they visited and saw for themselves. Everyone fell in love with Arthur and Martha.

Then something changed...

One day, Arthur and Martha didn’t pitch up for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner.

The next day, they were still missing. Days passed with no sign of them. Weeks went by. Then months.

Danielle and I were distraught. We worried and wondered what had happened to them. Eventually, we made peace with the idea that nature had taken its course. We had simply been fortunate to share part of our lives with two wild storks.

We came to terms with the fact that we might never see them again.

Then, one Saturday, while having lunch on the veranda, we saw storks approaching from a distance.
Arthur and Martha came flying in from the south with a third, slightly smaller bird in tow and landed by the pool as if they’d never been gone.

They had brought another stork with them.

A baby stork.

That explained everything. They had been away breeding, raising a chick, and had brought it home.
Arthur demanded his mince immediately. Danielle scrambled to feed them before any acts of vandalism commenced.

They spent days around the pool, quite content to have their culinary needs taken care of rather than foraging for food in some distant swamp, as nature intended.

A while later, they chased the baby stork away. For his own good, I guess. The time had come to go forth and learn to fend for itself.

Arthur’s trust in me deepened.

He began taking food from my hand - shredded chicken, chunks of kingklip, calamari tubes, even fried peri-peri chicken livers.
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​Sometimes he would sunbathe, parked off in a goofy pose that was too comical for words.

And then something bad happened.

One night, while I was away racing at Kyalami, we had an attempted break-in. Fortunately, I had my in-laws John and Teddy stay with Danielle while I was away. John woke in the middle of the night to find a burglar trying to gain access through one of the lounge windows.

That incident changed everything.

A sudden crime wave flared up in the neighbourhood. Our property was too large and spread out to secure effectively. It would have cost a fortune, and there would always have been weak points. We had no choice but to appoint night guards while looking for a safer place to live.

Eventually, we found a secure house in Hillcrest, a neighbouring suburb about twenty kilometres away as the crow flies - pun intended.

Danielle was in tears the day we moved.

It was an incredibly sad moment. Leaving our beloved friends Arthur and Martha behind, not knowing what would become of them.

Time marched on.

Our bird sanctuary faded into memory. We put up bird feeders in the trees at the new house, and a few small birds came - but nothing like the swarms we’d had in Westville. We scattered chunks of bread around the pool. The odd Hadeda or two would stop by but never stayed long.

One day, a pair of storks landed in the yard, and we were beside ourselves with excitement - but they were skittish and flew off before we could feed them. After that, we more or less gave up on the idea of ever getting a vibe going with the birds of Hillcrest. 
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But here’s the kicker.

The truly unbelievable part.

One day, almost a year to the day after we moved from Westville, Arthur and Martha dropped in. Totally unexpected.

​They had found us.

Twenty kilometres away.

Arthur was immediately up to his old antics. We scrambled to serve their mince, just as we always had. Martha did her characteristic MotoGP run around the pool when she saw Danielle appear with a plate of mince.

It was really them. No doubt.

Danielle had tears of joy rolling down her cheeks. I was doing my best to hold back my own emotions. It was incredible. Completely unbelievable.

They remained on our property of their own free will, and we continued our friendship as before.

But how the hell had they managed to find us after a year?

Danielle and I discussed it many times. How did they track us down?

There could only be one explanation. The only common denominator they could use...

My spunky little Porsche 964.

The White Goose.

They must have recognised the car from our Westville days, spotted it from the air, and followed it to our new home in Hillcrest.

There can be no other explanation.
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True story.

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“In my world, even the birds are petrolheads.”
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- Pierre Martins​

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