Photo: WILLIAM WEST / AFP / Getty Images
The hair of an isolated and nostalgic English woman living in Africa became a human nest
for a baby bird for almost three months.
“Every day I made small ‘nests’ in my hair, in the groove of my collarbone, which filled me in amazement”, told The Guardian newspaper Hannah Bourne-Taylor, photographer and editor based in London.
“She got under from a curtain of hair and would gather individual strands with its beak, sculpting them into a round of woven strands, resembling a little nest, and then nestle itself inside,” she continued. “I would let it fall apart when I was done and start again the next day.”
Bourne-Taylor and her husband Robin moved to Ghana at 2013, when he accepted a job there. But she was unable to work due to visa restrictions and had few friends and neighbors.
“I was left isolated, nostalgic and without purpose”, she said. He took solace in nature.
“After a particularly strong thunderstorm (in September of 2013), I found a baby bird, a bird known as a tan capuchin, barely a month old, on the ground,” said Bourne-Taylor.
“He was abandoned by his flock. His eyes were shut tight and he was trembling, he was too young to survive alone. It was the size of my little finger, with feathers the color of rich tea biscuits, eyes like ink, and a beak as small as a pencil lead.”
The little bird and the woman created a close bond in no time.
The next day, he woke up with his mouth open and a sharp cry of hunger. I fed him termites and instinctively sang to him. He screamed back and climbed into my hand, digging in his beak and head, then fell asleep in my palm. To him, I was his mother. During the following 84 days, he lived off me”, he narrated.
The tan capuchin grew up enough and got strong by the end of the year and managed to join his flock.
“Once in a while, when the flocks flew by, one stayed behind, on a branch, and he looked at me. I still cry when I think about him,” Bourne-Taylor added. “Raising him taught me to live in the present and changed me forever,” he said. “Last year when we returned to Oxfordshire I joined the local conservation efforts and wrote our story in a book, ‘Fledgling’. That, along with the lesson that any tiny animal can make a difference, will be his legacy.”