The Official Veterinary Surgeon at Customs, Mombasa Airport, shook a slightly belligerent finger at us.
“If these two” and he waggled his finger even more vigorously, “should escape from your custody you will be held personally responsible for committing a very serious crime indeed.”
We had arrived.
We had, bewilderingly, met the challenge of re-locating ourselves to Kenya’s Eastern coastal resort on the Indian Ocean.
‘Ourselves’ requires something of an explanation.
‘Couple’ wouldn’t cover it.
‘Family’ could be misleading.
‘Menagerie’ hmmm... getting warm now.
‘Troupe’ - exactly right!
Our troupe included myself, my enthusiastic husband, two gallant dogs, a feisty blue and gold macaw and an incurious female boa-constrictor.
The single threatening finger became more specific.
Madison, the macaw, and Bo, the snake, were the potential culprits.
Our two South American pets remained blissfully unaware of the strict laws against their escaping from our custody.
And neither showed the slightest concern for the dire consequences that might befall us should they attempt to abandon our care for the freedom of the African continent.
Bo slept on. Madison looked down disdainfully from her highest perch.
We quickly attempted to recover from this surprising and gratuitous slur on our integrity.
With as much conviction as our collective sleep-deprived brains could muster, we assured the official that Bo and Madison would be guarded with our lives and that, on no account, would they be allowed to contaminate the African gene pool.
And at last we were winding-down, relaxing and absorbing the stunning beauty of our new African home.
From the shade of the veranda, with our early, much-needed and well iced liquid ‘sun-downer’ in our hands we began to soak-up the idyllic surroundings.
The sun had not yet lost its heat nor the air its humidity and that really very enchanting time of day, second only to dawn, was imminent.
Mango trees, frangipani, hibiscus, bougainvillea and banana palms swayed slightly in the light breeze.
The swimming pool shimmered invitingly.
A mere minute’s stagger from the veranda and our toes could be tickled by the Indian Ocean.
The stress of transporting our household and our lives began to ebb away.
Despite the heat and humidity, Seanachie, our fawn Great Dane appeared un-fazed at the upheaval to his life and Potcheen, our busy-body brindle Boxer, was, as ever, lying in her red-alert position at our feet.
Both had already nominated and diligently marked their new domain and, satisfied with this important undertaking, were now relaxing.
Bo, for once experiencing natural warmth, slept soundly oblivious to both her new surroundings and her African cousins hiding in the coral walls only yards from where she lay.
But there was a single member of the troupe who was missing.
Madison.
Our poor macaw; she had been through an ordeal. In the previous 24 hours she had been flown 5,000 miles in the hold of an aircraft and equally deserved to share these first precious moments together with us.
Now, for all her seven imperious years, Madison had spent all her available hours observing, interacting and commenting on all household activities from an open perch; often while splitting raw peanuts noisily and discarding their shells with cheerful abandon.
When offered, she would gracefully take a potato chip in her left claw and hold it with a jaunty delicacy. While fixing an eye on any and all gathered nearby she would slowly savour every last morsel accompanied by little chortles of deeply appreciative glee
I never really counted the number of chips she consumed but I always subconsciously allowed a special portion for her when preparing them.
My husband, with ill-disguised disapproval at Madison’s lack of house-training, would make dark hints about building ‘an external aviary’.
I would point out she was used to warmth and constant human companionship and would probably die from shock if she were consigned to the garden.
So far we, Madison and I, had won the day.
And she would walk, scramble or command one of us to take her wherever she needed to go. She had never flown.
Madison, therefore, had never been clipped.
So Madison joined the rest of the troupe, sitting on the arm of my chair and squinting at the bright sunlight.
She looked about her, coolly examining paradise for any flaws.
All was calm.
When, without warning, the air was rent with raucous voices.
A dozen or more Vervet monkeys had swung through the air without, it seemed, any visible means of support.
One could tell they knew this route blindfolded.
We had been vaguely aware that the Vervets had been keenly observing our arrival and our settling in from the safety of the nearby forest.
Now they were to establish their collective presidency.
And they were not going to be discreet about it, either.
Both dogs leapt up barking.
Madison shrieked and lost her footing - she was forced to spread her wings for balance.
And, for the first time in her life, Madison became air-borne.
For those unaccustomed to tropical vicissitudes, it must be explained that along with monkeys doing their rounds and humans unwinding on verandas, the cooling breeze from the ocean begins to quicken as the afternoon matures.
Every living creature is intensely grateful for this cooling breeze. It is a breeze that occasionally culminates in tiny refreshing squalls.
Today the breeze was particularly inopportune.
Madison’s initial swoop from the veranda’s edge caught the upward sweep of the inshore breeze and she clearly loved the sensation.
Spreading her magnificent wings with their trailing, shimmering and iridescent blue stabilising feathers she soared away from the clamour of the monkeys, the barking dogs and our horrified faces.
By the time she neared the top of the tallest mango tree, she had, more or less, grasped the basics of flying.
Now for her landing.
She made an accomplished air-brake turn and alighted safely on its uppermost branch.
Our thoughts were already running amok.
We had already committed the unforgivable.
On our first day.
Prison was a high probability. Deportation definitely inevitable.
We had to capture her.
And quickly.
The problem, though, was made infinitely worse by the fact that this daily breeze is also the signal that nightfall is barely an hour or so away.
And on the equator, the sun sets swiftly - from bright light to pitch black may be only 40 minutes.
Today, on our very first day, even though exhausted by the travel and the officialdom surrounding our arrival, we had to act decisively and successfully - time was of the essence.
We called her name in the most ingratiating and friendliest way we could muster between anxiously clenched teeth.
We could see Madison very clearly silhouetted against the sky.
She did look extremely beautiful - her gold breast complimenting the rich green of the mango leaves. She plucked one off and dropped it on to our heads.
She was not going to come down.
Not now and, probably, not ever.
We brought out her perch, rattled it and laid out her most favourite food on her tray.
Madison was savouring the situation. The attention was very gratifying and there was no question about it - she had the upper hand.
Today even her favourite chocolate biscuits were no inducement.
The shamba boy cutting the grass nearby knew that white people were odd, so the sight of this new English family laying biscuits out on a high metal tray and then calling up into the sky didn’t immediately strike him as any more strange than he expected.
He might have thought it to be a quaint English religious rite.
We heard him call to his brother.
Eventually our anxious tones were being more widely reported and our neighbours, together with their staff, came to offer assistance.
Madison surveyed all 14 of us and didn’t like the look of the situation.
Once again she took to the air.
But the breeze had fallen so she lacked the necessary upward lift and began descending rapidly.
Her strange surroundings and inexperience with flying were against her.
She belly-landed clumsily in a bush.
All 14 rushed to the spot.
Although Madison has quite a wide and varied vocabulary she was not yet, of course, fluent in Swahili.
So she interpreted the louder calls as being of an unfriendly nature and looked around for an escape route.
It was the ‘now or never’ moment.
Without hesitation my husband transformed himself into a bougainvillea bush-surfer and launched himself.
His hands closed over one of Madison’s legs. She attempted another take-off. My husband hung on, grimly.
Now, macaws are really big on dignity and this was not what Madison understood as being dignified.
No, not at all.
She took her resentment out on my husband’s thumb.
Blood flowed freely.
Of the others watching, only I appreciated my husband’s bravery – and his suffering.
Effortlessly macaws open Brazil nuts with their beaks alone.
Madison does so regularly - so a human thumb was as nothing in comparison.
But the day had been saved and the threat of handcuffs and incarceration faded as relief welled up through us.
As I administered first aid to the thumb, we reflected on the notion that the heat and euphoria of the tropics causes moments of madness in most humans and many animals.
Even the tortoise was not immune.
But that is another story for later - or as they say in Swahili, ‘badaye’.

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