Let's give the dikkops their due

Lo, I stand before you and say without shame: I am rather fond of dikkops. In fact, I think they’re underrated, and we should feel privileged to have them in our midst.

The dikkop to which I refer is not, as an English friend of mine assumed, a dickhead, but rather the nocturnal, ground-nesting cousin of the plovers, a member of genus Burhinus.

Elsehere in the English-speaking world, they are referred to as “thick-knees”, which makes perfect since as their knees (actually the equivalent of our ankles) are no thicker than those of any other bird; better than being known as the “thick-ankles” I suppose. The English have traditionally called them stone curlews.

I like pretty much everything about dikkops. Their long yellow legs with their tiny feet and comical, high-stepping gait. Their beautifully cryptic colouration. Their huge eyes. Their stillness during the day and their strange, haunting cries, the defining sound of the Highveld night — or at least they were before shrieking house alarms, police sirens and dooses revving high-powered motorbikes.

Though they are still relatively common in some suburbs, their habitat is threatened by the relentless march of the developers’ bulldozer, and unlike the crowned plovers that will happily live on little patches of grass in the middle of highways, dikkops require large areas of undisturbed ground. The best place to see one, if you don’t have a dikkop living near you, is to visit the Johannesburg Zoo. The aviary there is full of them.

Right now a pair of dikkops is breeding, as they do every year, in a corner of my grandmother’s garden. Occasionally her small dog will chase them and they will rise up, spread their wings and hiss loudly to scare her off. The local cats leave them alone, and they’re the only birds that won’t be bullied by the resident Egyptian goose. The chicks, when they hatch, will look like little balls of fluff on toothpicks.

Once, while driving back from a work function, I watched in astonishment as a mother dikkop stopped traffic on 14th Avenue just before the turn-off on to the highway. Walking in the road with her family, she spread her wings to bring the traffic to a halt, staring into the headlights of the cars, while her three chicks crossed safely. In this strange, blaring, blinding world, where night was no longer night, and where everything was alien to what her genes had programmed her for, she showed tremendous courage in the face of an unknown foe.

It’s a dangerous world for dikkops. When we first started dating, my ex-husband accidently ran one over after visiting me; he was wracked with guilt about that for years. A former colleague used to complain constantly about the pair that lived near her apartment building. They made too much noise at night, and she wanted to get rid of them. I wondered why she couldn’t just invest in a pair of earplugs and enjoy the local birdlife, but some people are just like that.

I’d rather celebrate that there are any dikkops in this world at all. If anything, I find their presence reassuring. Somehow, despite all the screeching blandness and the dreadful gridlock of the soul we call modern living, something of the wild lives on still, and we should treasure it.