It began an hour or so before with the unholy shriek of alarms. A groan in the first bed, an audible expulsion of frustration (or was that a fart) in the second bed, and in the third bed silence, or if you listened very carefully the sound of grinding teeth. Outside birds and their songs rang free, unbothered by the electrical bird that knew only one song and sung it at the same time every day. What did bother the birds were the two-legged flightless birds that were now awake in response to the song from the electrical bird.
“Good morning,” one of the flightless birds said to two of its chicks after walking across its nest. The sound disturbed Heckling the Hadeda from his worm hunting, he squawked a warning his fellow winged birds, “She is AWAAAKE!” and to be certain he repeated it a few times. Then slowly in his old-man gait walked to the centre of the lawn, where the flightless she-bird would not unnerve him with her stare and her weird feathery mane, to continue his worm breakfast. Several of the other birds including Looney the laughing dove, Ruckus the rock dove, Goofy the Egyptian goose all responded to Heckling with their calls of “Thank you, Heckling the brave.” They called him that because he would always be the last to leave the flightless bird’s nest, waiting until the last moment and sometimes scaring the featherless chicks.
The flying birds never knew what family of birds of the solid nesters belonged to – they were awake during the day and during the night, were they day-time owls, or a night-time crows? Sometimes they fought like roosters all blustery and feathery, and at times they pranced around the garden like peacocks and peahens in their best regalia. They swam as good as Goofy, and lived in a nest bigger than any bird had ever seen! They also collected trinkets and shiny objects like Marlin the magpie and stuck the trinkets to their walls, on the floor, and even used shiny things to transport them. Most confusing to everyone, but especially Oscar the owl because he was the only one out at night watching them across the thousand moons, is their need to have a burning nest every night. Heckling saw those same burning nest every morning.
Some mornings Heckling screamed at the bird with the golden feathery mane when she lit the nest on fire. “Get out, fire! Get out, fire!” Some days it looked like it was working as one of the flightless birds looked at him, but then they either shooed him or closed their nest – they were the only bird with a nest that moved, as with many things about the featherless birds no one knew why you needed a nest that moved. The maned bird clucked over the fire whilst its chicks clucked back, Goofy thought the chicks were frightened of the maned bird and needed rescuing, like the time he saved Looney from Harry the hawk – but this is not the time to scare anyone with Harry’s name!
Ruckus called out to the rest of the winged birds, “they are eating!” she had made out the unmistakable shape of a seed. Her own belly grumbled back at her discovery, and her eyes widened as she saw the featherless chicks pushing the seeds away. Oh, no she thought. Her babies in her nest were hungry, and it was too early to go on the search for food, you see cats are on the prowl. Ruckus knew she will have to wait until it was hot, and the cats are lazily sleeping. She said nothing to the maned bird only because she couldn’t speak her clucks, but she wished she could ask her for a few seeds every morning to make sure her young ones had full bellies.
In response to Ruckus, several of the birds agreed, ‘yes you are right Miss Ruckus, they are eating!’ But what a turmoil. In the winged bird kingdom chicks made a commotion to get food, but once the food arrived they gobbled it greedily and almost silently. The featherless chicks were different.
They were commotion when they were unseen and recently woken up, they were commotion when the bath was run to rid them of mites and lice, they were commotion before food, they were commotion after food, and they were even commotion when nothing else seemed to be going on. This was something all the birds agreed on. Commotion.
Excitedly the birds discussed. They twittered. They fluttered. They crowed. They hooted – even owl was still awake. They cawed. They knew. The featherless birds – except for the crowns on their heads – had a name! From today they were to be called the ‘commotions’.
The one who clucked the loudest and the most would be Claumotion the commotion.