All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?
—Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha
Jim was a birdwatcher in his youth, but a violent one. He tells this bird hunting story with much regret:
I was a hunter in my childhood and teenage years, shooting birds and collecting their wings as trophies. It was a hobby many boys of my age indulged in. There would be shouts of triumph when the thud of the pellet from my air rifle signalled a hit, and the doomed bird fell like a stone or fluttered their way to the ground. If injured, they were quickly dispensed with by wringing their necks.
The experience was always unsettling. I felt a sense of loathing whenever I had a ‘success’—with sadness, sometimes bringing tears when I picked up the injured, shivering, or lifeless little body.
One day, when I was about ten years old and we were living in a town on the banks of the Limpopo River, a hunting incident occurred that would change me forever. A beautiful sugarbird was busy fluttering around the flowers in our front garden—sucking nectar from an aloe in our flower bed. I ran inside to collect my air rifle, intent on securing that bird’s wing!
As she fluttered around, intent on visiting flower after flower, I drew a bead on the little coloured body. The pellet found its mark, and the sugarbird dropped to the ground, stone dead. I ran into the house, holding my prize high. But I did not reckon on my sister Joan’s reaction. She took one look at the tiny, feathered figure I held in my bloodied hand and let out a piercing scream, “Dad, come quick; Jimmy has killed our little sugarbird.”
My dad believed in “spare the rod and spoil the child”; I was not spared, but I spent that night crying over what I had done. Then, I did not realise it, that little sugarbird would haunt me forever.
Jim then had his ‘Damascus Road[i]’ experience after shooting that Guinea fowl for dinner, and being scolded by Peter and Hilda. The guilt never really left him. Recently, a photo of a honeyeater (Figure 1 below) at the Blue Lotus Water Garden in the Yarra Valley, Victoria, reminded him once again of that little sugarbird. The honeyeater was busy deciding whether to suck nectar or catch an insect sitting within a flower, much like the sugarbird he had once encountered on the banks of the Limpopo.
This time, however, he was happy. He knew that the honeyeater would not meet an untimely end from a pellet fired from his air rifle.
Figure 1: Honeyeater—Blue Lotus Water Garden, Yarra Valley.
[i] Wikipedia contributors. (2025, April 14). Conversion of Paul the Apostle. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Paul_the_Apostle.