The poor parrots

Nick and I had been filming a massive derelict cathedral in the town Mandu. From there I was to run on to the edge of the plateau and then down to the Namara river. This area has been such mental food and stimulation compared to the rest of the MP province so it was worth taking time off to look at these beautiful; old buildings. We walked around the back of the ruin following a path back to the road. The path wound through some really small little farms and orchards. Then we descended into a bigger guava orchard. On entering we heard some really strange load squawking of birds ahead.

We followed the sound and our hearts dropped. There ahead of us were very fine nets draped over the trees to protect the fruit, but what caught our eyes and really made our hearts sink were the beautiful brightly coloured green red and yellow parrots trapped in the nets, the one parrot was dangling by his feet, totally twisted up in the fine nylon string, flapping madly trying to escape and biting at anything that he could reach trying to release himself.

The other bird was not so lucky, his whole body and wings were totally entwined in the net, I could see that he had been panicking and struggling for some time, it was in a bad way. There was a woman close by, I think she was actually the cause of this; I called her over to help release the birds. It was a mess and a fruitless exercise, I had no knife and the birds were just getting worse and worse. They were really freaking out and biting us and everything else, eventually the one just stopped fighting and hung there as if it knew that was it.

There was nothing I could do. Nick and I walked away defeated – why go to this extreme just to save one or 2 guavas?