The Enchanted Aviary: The Little-Boy Shrike Delivers A Greeting Card

Toward the end of the Philippine summer the female Dreamer Bird checked her calendar and saw that her hatchday was on the horizon. It wasn't just her hatchday--it was her beloved ring-eye's too, for they were brought into this world at the same time and at the same place. She perched at her sky-blue-and-cloud-white roll-top desk, opened her tin of greeting cards, and selected one to send the ring-eye. Using her favorite eclectus quill and a spot of indigo ink she inscribed the ring-eye's name and her own on the greeting card.

The female Dreamer Bird placed the card inside its tiny envelope and stamped it with her monogram. At the next reunion and mah-jongg session with the Cosmic Birds she took aside the little-boy shrike, who was helping the house lizards ice cupcakes in the kitchen, and asked him to deliver the card to the ring-eye that evening. The female Dreamer Bird gave him a tiny brass bell that he could hang inside his cage and play with.

After the party, as soon as the sun was about to set, the little-boy shrike flew out of the small loggia to the cage of the ring-eye, on the balcony of an upper-floor condominium tower behind the compound, with the greeting card in its beak. The ring-eye immediately recognized the young shrike from the many flying lessons the Divination Birds had been giving it across the compound. He admitted the shrike into his receiving room, where they had refreshing millet malt that the ring-eye poured into two mineral-water bottle caps.

The ring-eye snipped open the tiny greeting card and read out loud:

"Cardinals are red
Jays are blue
Ring-eyes are sweet
And so, are you"

"Ah, my pretty lovebird," the ring-eye smiled, pressing the greeting card to his breast, and said to the little-boy shrike, "Everything that comes from the heart is poetry, no matter how trite, and so everyone who has fallen in love is already surely a poet. So it is with humans, so it is with birds."

The little-boy shrike looked at the ring-eye and the interior of its cage with much interest, admiring the reds and oranges and yellows of the seed bowl, the water dispenser, and the swing. The ring-eye bade him stay a little longer as he prepared a little hatchday packet, a delightful surprise, for the female Dreamer Bird. "More millet malt?" he asked, and the shrike eagerly nodded its head. As he poured more millet malt into the bottle caps the ring-eye continued, "Humans fall in love the way birds do, but their societies are more hampered with rules made by men and not by Nature. Be thankful that you are a bird. You can fly, you can live a long life, you can have the blessing of love. The blessing of love comes from the sun, and the wind, and the trees, and the earth. All of this you will realize as you grow and mature."

The little-boy shrike had many questions about love and life, and so they talked long into the night.