The Most Foolish Bird

There is a very foolish bird called Ngune. That’s the name in my native Embu language, I don’t know it’s English name.

The bird only feeds on frogs, and the highlight of its foolishness is that it spends the whole day catching frogs from the river, and placing them on a rock on the riverbed (perhaps to dry them) so that it can eat them later.

The stupid thing about it is that whenever it places a frog on the river bed and gets back to the river to get another one, the frog immediately jumps back to the river, and chances are that it will pick the same frog in the next catch. This goes one for the better part of the day. At the end of the day, the foolish bird carries home just one frog, after laboring for a whole day.

To help this bird, we’ve come up with a very bizarre but workable plan. We are going to send someone into species travel, be laid as a Ngune egg and hatched into a Ngune chick, and grow to eat frogs. By speaking fluent Ngune-ese, he will teach other Ngunes that they need to eat the first frog they catch, before attempting to catch another one.

We don’t promise any security, or that Ngunes will believe him. We just hope that he will not be eaten by crocodiles and foxes, poisoned in a polluted river, or even die of hunger in case rivers run out of frogs or climate change gets rid of frogs. Besides, the Ngunes might not believe them.

Can we get a volunteer please?