Ribs

I´m learning to read and write and I like to do it on my own. All help is very welcome

     Today on my  return from the market I have seen a little coalbird. It was on a fence, swaying its red tail up and down. It was a female but the male was eight or ten meters further.

     I have not seen this bird for a long time and its presence remembered me when, in the land on the side ours, a father and his son hunted birds. They carried many traps which they buried in the soil. Traps made of wire with a rib form.

     Father and son waited for the fieldworker ploughed a furrow before starting to lay the ploy. The bait could be a bread ball, an earthworm or a winged ant but the better –according that man- were worms that live inside the stalk of thistles. Normally there is only one for each stalk because the first one that gets into the thistle puts a cap blocking the pass to another worm.

     Once passed the plough, if there weren´t cattle egrets, they laid the traps on the land recently dug. I once approached to see how they put them. Each seven steps one. One, two, three… seven, other rip. As the trap should work in a way they put a stone in the right place for the bird enter correctly to the ploy.

     In addition to redstarts, a great variety of little animals were trapped: meadow pipits, wagtails –both, white and grey-, dunnocks, stonechats, robins –our national bird-, blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinchs and once the ribhunter showed us a huge great grey shrike!

     I ought to confess that the image didn´t pleasant me. My sensation was that those alive bright colours flying, were dull now, without brilliance, dead. And when that good man occasionally offered my father part of his capture I felt relieved when fa –bringing out the best in himself- said “No, thank you. We don´t like them”. Asking my father why he had said that he told me “because they are poorer than us”. Then my piece of cheese and bread seemed to me more delicious.

     In this way a little coalbird sings.

     Your affectionate.

Mary