Naturally the Carnivore refused to part
with any of his breakfast – this man takes meat seriously. That didn’t stop the raucous squawking. There must have
been thirty of them. Believe me, thirty rainbow lorikeets make a lot of noise.
Pretty little beggars, aren’t they? We
shooed them away repeatedly, but they kept coming back, at least till the bacon
was gone. Clearly this was a regular gig for them.
Some people do encourage them, feeding them
bread and other things that are bad for them. We were good and hardened our
hearts, except for one member of our party, who offered a single piece of bread
to see if he could get one of them to feed from his hand.
No problem! If he’d had a bigger hand,
there would have been even more willing to oblige. They were fighting for
landing space.
And the views from that balcony?
And now I shall put on my English nerd hat: While writing this post it occurred to me how strange it is that “beggar” is spelled with an “ar”. The verb is to beg, and the person (or, in this case, bird) who does it is a beggar. But every other word constructed like this that I can think of ends in “er”: rider, runner, walker, keeper, scorer, chaser, drinker, shooter, killer, knitter, builder, etc, etc.
Damn, but the English language is a
squirrelly beast. Can anyone think of any other words that use the “ar”
construction?
