One evening, Dad brought home a baby hornbill whose feathers were just starting to sprout. He held it cupped between his hands and it was about the size of my fist, with pale eyes, soft sooty plumage and a curved bill. It was making weak plaintive trumpet-like calls – Chleeoo! Chleeoo! – that sounded like a baby crying. I was filled with tenderness for the small, lonely creature.

‘I found the nest abandoned,’ explained Dad. ‘I presume the parents were killed.’ The web of lines around his eyes seemed deeper today; he looked sucked dry.

‘How come?’

‘Oh, it’s hard to tell. A farmer might have shot them. Farmers hate hornbills because they break windows. They’re territorial birds. If they see their reflection, they think it’s an intruder and smash the glass trying to attack it.’

We made a nest for the creature in the silver teapot, padding it out with rags. Dad mixed up a solution of water and sugar and I tried to trickle some into its beak from a dropper, but the liquid dribbled out and ran down its chest, wetting the feathers.

‘It will die if it doesn’t take anything,’ I said, anxiously.

‘You mustn’t force it,’ Dad counselled. ‘Be patient.’

I sat beside the hornbill all evening, stroking its trembling little body with my finger and willing it to drink. Dad encouraged me whilst carrying out his usual evening activities of writing notes, cataloguing his specimens and reading. He said it was a male bird, so I decided to call him Tucker. At last, Tucker accepted a few drips of sugar water and I was overjoyed. When bedtime came, I took his teapot into my room and slept with him on my bedside table.

It had rained in the night, which made the morning feel fresh and relaxed. Tucker had some more sugar water. Within a few days he was devouring pieces of banana and cold chicken. He also ate grasshoppers, but they were harder to catch. The more he ate, the more he messed in the house. Dad said that adult females seal themselves into their nests with their own faeces and are fed by the males through a vertical slit. Mum wasn’t happy about having to clean up after Tucker, so we had to put him in the garden. But he never ventured far, and he always came back to the house, morning and evening, to be fed.

One day, as Dad was walking near the Mozambique border, he collected several specimens of a small butterfly. Their wings were deep purple with black edges, and the underpart was brown with a number of eyespots. My father was alive to the subtle differences between and within species and he recognised at once that these were uncommon.