Bush Pilot - Hugh Pryor

Papagai

Many years ago, in the early sixties, I did two years’ service in the mandated Australian territory of New Guinea. In those days it was a strictly Colonial set up. Most of the local population didn’t need a ‘dress sense’ because they didn’t have much dress. ‘Locals’ were not allowed to walk on the side-walks and the police wore ‘Lap-laps’, a kind of wrap-around, dark blue cotton kilt. If you wanted to find out what old fashioned ‘colonialism’ was all about, then New Guinea was where you went.

Iwas based at a place called Simbai, up in the Schroeder Mountains, on the border between the Madang and Western Highland districts. Although I was still ten years away from becoming a pilot, it was at Simbai that I first became infected with the Avio-virus. The origin of my infection was a wild sulphur-crested cockatoo whom I addressed as ‘Papagai’, that being the word for Parrot in Pidjin, the local language.

Papagai adopted me very soon after my arrival and she took up residence in the apex of the thatched roof of my timber and bamboo house. I was considered to be especially ‘blessed’ among the locals by the fact that she had chosen me on whom to bestow her favours. Apparently, according to local legend, the sulphur crested cockatoo was given to the world by the sun. The

‘hi-viz yellow’ crest flying proudly above the purest pristine-white plumage was to remind the humble humans down below how gloriously the sun danced above the white clouds.

The strange thing was that Papagai had never been seen before in our area. She just appeared out of the forest and adopted me the very day that I arrived. She was not a domesticated pet. She had certainly never seen a white man before, because they had only arrived in Simbai about four years before I got there, but there was something about me that she found absolutely fascinating and I found her attentions to be delightfully welcome in those totally unfamiliar stone-age surroundings.

Normally speaking, if we have a pet dog we like to teach it how to communicate with us...We say “Puppy come!” or “Puppy Sit!” or “Puppy Don’t Crap In Here!”, but with Papagai it was the other way round. She would perch on my bedpost and start chattering away and preening herself, as if to say, “You humans must be stupid! You don’t even know how to fly!”

Then, chattering away and preening all the time, she would show me how her ‘aileron’ feathers and her ‘flaps’ and ‘speed brake’ feathers worked. Then she would move on to her cleverly synchronised ‘elevator/rudder’ feathers, down the backend.

Then, having shown me what all the bits and pieces did, she would perform a spectacular vertical climb straight up to her nest, in the roof, where she chattered, to catch my attention, before swooping down for a faultless short-field landing on my shoulder, as if to demonstrate the extraordinary sophistication of her sturdy and fully retractable undercarriage.

Some months later, Papagai got married and had two delightful little ‘sprogs’. Her husband didn’t come into the house very much, preferring to keep a watch for any unwanted visitors.

I had the immense pleasure of watching the new arrivals taking their first ‘solos’. The house was ideal for their first experimental flips, because there was lots of woven bamboo and sticks for them to grab hold of if they got the landings a bit skew during their work-up for operations in the outside world.

When they had built up enough courage to venture outside, Dad flew top-cover over the roof to make sure that no uninvited marauders could take advantage of the little learners. You would be mistaken for thinking that a fluffy little cockatoo would be no match for a determined hawk, but I would draw your attention to the extraordinary agility it has in flight, especially as it is armed with razor sharp talons and a beak which can quite easily take a person’s finger off.

I left New Guinea a couple of years later and I heard that Papagai and the family had returned to the surrounding forests, when I went back to the UK. But that is definitely where I caught the aviation bug, thank you Papagai! 