In a bird friendly garden, the business of birds seems unending. Generation after generation of weaver birds make their nests above the pond, stripping the branches of the A. karoo near the nests of all leaves and showering the ground with green shreds. We see the angry red eyed males learning to build, mastering building and then tearing their efforts to shreds again. The young birds starting with tiny or misshapen nests, learn from the approval or indifference of their customers, the females, and change their blueprint accordingly. A male hops on a water pipe in the garden, slipping and falling as he tears at the grass growing by the pond. We see selections of nests, galleries for the delectation of chirping and flapping clients. We see nests that start as transparent rigging through which the sky shines, turning solid, starting small, then thickening as if pregnant, turning from grass green to straw. We see the fluttering of the males marketing their products until the screeching chicks keep parent birds in a state of near exhaustion. We see the messy nests of doves and starlings in the forked branches, the piping white eyes, an occasional rare finch which has blown its way in from the desert, or once, a delicate vase of a nest made from thin threads and lined with down, whose creator I've eludes me, and every morning we're woken by the dawn chorus that starts with the isolated rasping of the loud mouthed weaver bird. Perhaps he's the Kloppert of the birds. Peeping through the window I can see the feathered ones feed in the little hanging house my father made for them. The doves are too large to fly in, so they perch on the roof of the house eyeing the food, twisting their necks this way and that, without developing a strategy. However, I'm impressed by the skill of weavers, and the complexity of their lives, which belie the small physical size of their brains. Our windows are like flatscreen TV's giving onto a never ending soap opera, making Eisat dishes needed by neighbours superfluous for us. Our open windows relay to us the arias that accompany every avian action. In the afternoon its celebratory, with warbling and winged flitting across the sky, flurrying in the dust or spraying drops out of the birdbath with a wet cartoon coif. Therefore if you wish for an integration of meditation and amusement, I'd highly recommend that you do feed the birds. I've been told its a form of prayer. And don't clip all the grass short, and leave those messy tangles of creepers on the fence, don't pick up the rotten fruit. Horticultural laziness is an investment. Dozens of square metres of worm beds, four kinds of fruiting trees and aloes and bees and flies and horse manure and having a garden so green that its an anomaly in the area when seen on google earth may also be helpful. With scenery and props in place, the show will start, but thereafter, the performers are reluctant to leave. From the morning on which their ancestor weaver found a tree with a pond, I'd estimate ten generations have lived with us.