Every day it was a treat to watch birds preening their feathers. Celina loved to watch the birds sitting and preening on the big mango tree in the backyard.
In birds, preening is a behaviour that helps them to maintain hygiene of the feathers. Birds usually use their beaks and feet to preen their feathers.
As feathers are the main asset for the birds to fly in the air, they take the utmost care to maintain cleanliness. Sometimes, birds preen mutually which showed their mutual love and affection. Once Celina burst into a loud laugh when she saw a little sparrow bundled into a position like a ball while preening. Usually during the morning time, crows or mynas or sparrows that come to pick the morsels left at the backyard would fly away immediately, if they heard human steps. But while preening, they never paid attention to things around them and looked more studious and concentrated in cleaning their feathers. For Celina those hours never looked long and tedious. Without moving her eyes away from the birds, she sat watching them.
Celina’s thoughts took her elsewhere. Do men and women have preening behaviour? To tell the truth, yes. It is interesting to know such behaviour exist with man also. Just like a woman who takes the maximum care to dress well to attract men, man also sports preening behaviours to tell his mind. Pressing down his shirt sleeves or straightening his hair is a type of preening behaviour in man which is a sign of attraction. Though Celina had watched young men doing so while travelling in the bus or walking down the street, she never came across such a thing in her life.
Unfortunately, from her front view, for all men she looked so plain and dumb and she never succeeded in attracting the attention of any men of her age. Instead they scorned at her and often teased her calling ‘one eyed ogre’.
To continue….