Human. Nature.

On checking one of my many email accounts today, I read a mail from Evelyn, who shared one of her recent encounters at her office:

On my office patio, a pair of sunbirds built a nest on a potted plant sometime mid Feb. It was such a lovely sight, watching them flitting around... with whatever materials (including pealed-off paint) they could find to build the nest. As they built the nest for a week, we watched them from behind the glass partition.

After completing the nest, they stopped coming for about a month.

Yesterday evening, I saw a colleague at the plant with a plastic bag. I rushed out to the patio…………..but it was all too late. She has cut the nest and put it in the plastic bag, intending to bring it home! She thought the nest has been abandoned.

So typical of us, right? (Ahem, I wanted to say 'Singaporeans' but I wasn't sure of the nationality of the culprit in question, so I shall generalise). But did the culprit think for a sec what would she want with a Sunbird's nest at home? Make a lamp shade maybe?

Isn't it human nature to always want to interfere in some way or another with Mother Nature? How often have you wanted to grab, hold, fondle, cuddle or caress any objects, animate or in-animate, that you think is "nice"? We have to pick flowers in bloom, feed monkeys in the wild, throw rocks into an otherwise calm pond, profess our undying love for our lust/infatuation on million-year old rock faces. About rock faces, rock climbers just can't leave them alone huh? We just have to scale them and leave our chalk all over...


Evelyn, being the ardent animal-lover that I know her as, was heart-broken over this episode. Her email went out to her group of friends and to which Kee Seng, who empathises with her, consoled her with this photo taken from an ecogarden that he built for a school.

All well, there's some destruction, and there's some construction. The equilibrum of the Universe is still in balance.

And I can go back to sleep tonight.