... once upon a time ... a long long time ago ...

Small satchets of happenings from pockets of my life, as lapses of memories rewind to the particular place, moment and time ... realities of life
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" MAY PEACE BE UPON YOU "

Friday, February 13, 2009

Jerat Burung Wak Wak (Trapping Padi Birds)

There are a lot of birds in the padi field. Most birds would feed on the padi. We were particularly interested in the long legged brown bird which is normally found near waters, like the padi fields. We would used small stones on elastics to shoot at those birds; which is normally a far cry from hitting any. Our best choice to catch these birds is to trap them. These birds would normally walk on the edges of the padi fields and fly off whenever danger approach them. We would then try to identify on the normal walking tracks of these birds, so that we could lay our traps.

The traps are made up of strings to catch the birds; normally attached to the end of the pole; the pole of which are bent down to lay the trap on the ground. When the birds walked over it, it will trigger the 'catch' and by normal nature's way, will stretched back the pole into position or kick back to it's original position and thus will trap the bird's leg within the string attached to the pole.The poles could be small trees from shrubs growing on the sides of the padi fields.

Normally we do not catch any; but when we catch one or two of these 'wak wak' birds, we would slaughter them, take their feathers off; and with some salt cooked them over a small fire. Since they are normally 3 or 4 of us, we share to eat what we catch. Sometimes, while fishing we would lay the traps and check on it once in a while. Never know what the actual name are these birds, but they sure are tasty; grilled with some salt over s small fire!

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