Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: wildlife

  • blue last

    The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.

    Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.

  • better to have loved and won

    The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.

    This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.

    Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.

    He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.

    We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.

    He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.

    Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”

  • dusk, dusk, dusk

    The strange screeching of tropical birds spurling into midnight’s blue sky at 6 o’clock, as the night gathers like a dew, forms like a band, a marching band of strange and unaccountable, uncountable, nasty-beaked bird, weird big birds, glossy little birds, green birds and brown. Brisbanana. You are utterly the weirdest, my sweet suburban love.

  • bushel of sanity

    When I walk downhill carrying my computer and the old man sitting underneath the tree nods when I say, marvelling, There’s a lovely butterfly clinging to the underside of that hedge, brown one, just hanging there, and he says, Yeah, they coming round, this time of year, I feel like there is sanity in the world, humanity, generosity, kindliness, sense. When I offer my handful of deep pink lillypillies to the girl with the blond mop who makes my coffee and she has lived in Brisbane all her life and had never heard of nor even seen them, and makes me eat one before she will try, I feel like we are building ourselves a hell in which no one can be happy and everyone addicted to their gaming, shows, anti-depressants, painkillers, grog, psychotic energy drinks, caffeine and sugar and fat, and that we have dragged everything living under this falling cliff face with us – all is lost – there can never be any kind of kind world again except what some few shivering survivors might build, round a fire lit in an old fat 1990s television case, as the waters around them surge with bodies and trash.

    The loss is most likely not so cleanly apocalyptic as that, it is rather a creeping, board-meeting, bargain-hunting thing. Since my childhood so much beautiful is gone. We live as though we have forgotten. I remember when you set out for a walk and did not take your phone along: you were untraceable, in the elements; you had stepped into the wild and imagination lit from tree to tree and trundled like an old monkey behind you. But the blond girl in the coffee shop obligingly replays the song that was finishing splendidly when I came in, she is excited, “It’s my favourite song at the moment,” and I read down the sides of their stacked takeaway cups a series of excerpts of someone’s writing, and the clattering jackhammers chatter in the treetops as another giant building is assembled down the street, I can draw no conclusions about anything and I too know by font three thousand different brand names and recognise only a few hundred kinds of plants. The same scarlet beetle drops on my keyboard as greeted me last time, its yellow feelers waving like stalks of pollen in the air, sensing things I cannot know and having no urge I guess to check its emails, write back to anyone, wonder what it is really doing with its life or order more coffee. I feel so hollow inside and so strangely, ridiculously thankful this creature is warming its thin case of body on the quiet warmth of my machine.

  • flowers upturned

    Tonight I passed a very low hedge, glossy and cropped to ankle height. Into the shining thicket of its waxy green leaves someone had dropped two white flowers, different flowers, lying face upwards as though growing there… because we are all in the glittering gutter, but some of us gazing at the stars. Earlier in the week I found and have kept the tail of a bright pink balloon, just the knotted end which captures the breath, starfish-seamed and reminding me irresistibly of a belly button. As I walked along thinking of the flowers and remembering the belly button remnant of balloon I saw three people stop at a traffic light. Two large guys wearing black and between them, toes turned out and wearing a gathered skirt, a small woman carrying two hula hoops over her shoulder at rest. She was like a soldier comfortable with her bayonet.

     

     

  • underStorey

    Kookaburra under the eaves of the giant Storey Bridge, last night as it grew dusk and we were all gathering to watch Utopia. Laughing and laughing and laughing. The laughter echoed and magnified around the joists and girders and cars passed overhead, one at a time, each one thumping quietly the joints that let that bridge breathe and expand. Maybe bridges don’t breathe. Maybe birds don’t laugh. But I stand here with my human head thrown back and this is about all I see.