They arrived two years ago - out of the blue on a sunny spring day.
Descended like two weary angels on a large patch of pansies in the front yard. They folded their wings behind their backs and solemnly surveyed the scenery over their crooked beaks: the wild exuberance of colour at their horny feet, along with the swirls of rain tumbling over the veranda at the front door.
They shook their tired heads at all this folly, their flat and sombre faces filled with disdain. Obviously they'd seen better.
Then they shrugged and set to work.
The soil was soft and moist and they attacked it with surprising vigour, zealously rooting about until they had plucked some stunned little invertebrate from its sheltered hollow, and deftly swallowed it.
I sat in my office and watched their remarkable success rate. But I was not pleased with their arrival. They're nobody's favourite bird.
They're annoying, what with their awful call and awful bathroom habits (think car windscreens covered in greyish slime).
I got up to shoo them away, but then I saw one of them lean over to its mate with its gawky sickle beak and nuzzle it lovingly behind the ear.
Aw. I sat down again, my heart wavering. That such an unloved creature could be in love...
The spell was quickly broken when they took off again, their hellish shrieks piercing the tranquil morning air. And that's when they lost my uncertain heart once again.
Why can't they bloody well sing, like proper birds should, I wondered tetchily.
Birds are the only creatures that wake up singing, as Antoinette Pienaar, that wise old soul of the Great Karoo, always says.
Apartfrom the hadeda, then, I want to add snippily. Theirs is a primitive shriek that harks back to the time of the great reptiles. Which could be technically true, because birds are considered to be living fossils, the only surviving relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex and other terrifying creatures from the Jurassic era.
Thankfully, most birds have calmed down since then, reinventing themselves into flamboyant, joyous singer-dancers. Except the hadedas, it seems, who still sound like the primordial spawn of Satan.
The same spawn that landed back among my pansies with an unholy racket the very next day.
In the shattered silence that followed, they piously folded their wings away and returned to work. But instead of hammering the soft soil, I noticed that the ‘old man' was collecting little twigs and feathery bits of dried fern and roots.
From time to time, he'd stop to stroke his mate's unlovely, flat-cheeked face with his unwieldy conk. And when his haul was deemed sufficient, he'd take it gingerly into his mouth, as if it were the rarest treasure, and silently depart, leaving her behind to graze at leisure.
I discovered the nest in an old oak in a neighbour's front yard. And it wasn't long before the missus was permanently ensconced, shyly peering down her schnoz at the comings and goings on the street below.
And soon I spotted three of them among the pansies, the two parents working doggedly - stabbing the soil, digging and plucking fat worms to feed the needy chick. Like automatons they worked, from dawn to dusk, their gangly offspring constantly begging, krr-krr, his own little beak quite useless still.
Then something peculiar happened: I grew protective of them, scolding the dog whenever she barked at them. On sleepless nights I'd listen for their startled cries, which broke out from time to time.
Bad dreams, I worried? Who knows what daily traumas the creatures must endure. Or were they, like so many among us, poor sleepers too?
Come daylight, they were quiet shadows working dutifully up and down the garden. And as I watched them, I discovered the lovely sheen of purplish-bronze the sun revealed along their flanks.
I marvelled at the tender way in which they dotingly caressed each other with their ungainly beaks.
After a lifelong aversion to these rowdy birds, flying vuvuzelas that they are, my new-found affection surprised me.
I had come to realise that they are part of who we are, crime- and corruption-battered children of this land. As true as boerewors and chakalaka, taxis and pantsula. They're part of the soundtrack of Mzanzi, of both the beauty and the horror in our lives.
And now that my eyes have been opened to their soft intimacies, the crooning in the nest, the awkward kisses at nesting time, I get it. I also know why I am anchored in this country. Elsewhere, I would miss them.
Home is where the hadedas are.
