The Flight of Birds

by Joshua Lobb

  Red rail Aphanapteryx bonasia

  He keeps wailing. She clings to him. He wails and wails. The rhythm changes. It undulates. The wails fluster and feather in the air. He feels his hand being taken. The woman’s hand is warm.

  Mascarene coot Fulica newtoni

  Broad-billed parrot Lophopsittacus mauritianus

  Then the room empties out. He can see it washing away, polishing the light.

  After a long time (An aeon? A childhood?) the girl untangles herself. She goes back to her book. The covers span open on her lap.

  Even though it’s just a fairy tale, he listens to his daughter’s voice as she begins to tell her story.

  Slender Moa Dinornis torosus

  Great elephant bird Aepyornis maximus

  Dodo Raphus cucullatus

  Aves Admittant

  The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

  John Berger, Ways of Seeing

  Years and years from now, I’ll be working as an island ecologist undertaking research on Cabbage Tree Island and my dad will come along as a volunteer assistant. It’ll be part of my postdoc. He and Mum will have been so proud of me: taking me out for pizza at the end of high school; for a massive banquet lunch after the BSc graduation; a hatted restaurant to celebrate the conferral of the PhD. Just Dad at the last one. ‘We always knew it would be birds with you,’ Dad will have said, many times, over the years. ‘I mean, all those Charlottes …’

  It’s a small island, only about thirty hectares, a k and a half from the entrance to Port Stephens. Its isolation will be perfect for my research: away from human population pressures and with a strong history of recovery programs. There are multiple species of birds on the island. Terrestrially, the standouts are the birds of prey (Peregrine falcons, white-bellied sea eagles) with occasional rainbow pitta and blue-faced honeyeaters and an abundance of grey shrike-thrushes. The most common seabirds on the island are the wedge-tailed shearwaters, the short-tailed shearwater, and, in two crevices in the rocks, a colony of little penguins. But I’ll be interested in the Gould’s petrel. They’re a small gadfly petrel—wingspan seventy centimetres; weight 180 to 200 grams. They’re trans-Pacific migrants; back in the ’teens, geolocative studies traced their pelagic distribution, a counter-clockwise sweep of the ocean, into the Tasman, round to Hawai‘i and back along the lower equatorial latitudes. They return to the breeding colony in October, about a month before laying. My supervisor will have been going there for years—when he’s there, winding his way up the gullies, it’ll be clear that the island is in his blood. This trip will be my third; I’ll have come as a volunteer, tagging on to my supervisor’s project, before unearthing my own research. I’ll be monitoring the incubation process of the GPs, noting any depletion of residual population or decrease in successful fledgings. When I use the words ‘depletion’ and ‘decrease’ in the car ride up to Port Stephens, I’ll ignore my dad’s scrunched-up face and the way he grips his seatbelt.

  From the mainland, the island looks like a humpback whale with a mossy coat. It’s on a tilt, the tail submerged and the body rising, poised to leap into the air. A dense rainforest grows on its back, on the leeside. Around the island is a ring of frothy waves, like the valances that my grandma—my mum’s mum—used to have around her bed base. I’ll smile at this thought and tell my dad about it, but he’ll stand on the pontoon in the marina, staring at the swelling water in the bay. His mind will be somewhere between terror and panic. That’ll be fine—as long as his thoughts don’t go to that other place, wherever it is—that place where he always wants to go.

  My supervisor will give a yank on the cord of the outboard motor.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ I’ll say. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  On the trip over, my supervisor will be squatting in the stern of the Zodiac, one hand steering, the other sweeping back his scraggly, flailing hair. His gnarled face will be pink from the spray. I’ll be sitting against the prow, my back to the gusting air. My dad will be cowering below me. As we ride the crest of a wave, my supervisor will be chatting to us, but we won’t be able to hear him over the thunder. As the base of the boat thumps against the water, my supervisor will hit what seems like a punchline and laugh into the wind. The boat will scud and curve around the island. On the ocean side, we’ll see fractured cliffs dropping sharply into the sea. I’ll note that these crags haven’t yet been affected by the sea-level shifts. My dad will look, eyes-wrinkled, into the sun.

  We’ll circumnavigate the island and come back to the western side. My supervisor will steer the dinghy into a small cove of serrated rocks.

  ‘… using the island as a cage,’ my supervisor will say into the stillness of the harbour.

  I’ll have heard this story before, so I’ll laugh and then say, ‘He doesn’t mean us, Dad.’ It’s a yarn my supervisor loves to spin about the introduction of rabbits onto the island. ‘It was a controlled experiment,’ he’ll say, ‘part of the Intercolonial Rabbit Commission’s attempts at eradication. Henry Parkes offered a reward of twenty-five thousand pounds—we’re talking like twenty million bucks in our money—and this French bloke, Louis Pasteur’s nephew …’

  My father will be glaring at the orange rocks. I’ll leap across first and my supervisor will chuck across the packs, still yabbering about the rabbit experiment. In 1906 Jean Danysz established an inoculation station on Broughton Island, north-east of Cabbage Tree. He wanted to see if rabbits infected with a pox virus would survive. They did, and ravaged the undergrowth. Somehow they made it to Cabbage Tree, too.

  ‘Your turn now, Dad,’ I’ll say.

  He’ll look at me across the sliver of black water. The Zodiac will bump against the rocks.

  He won’t move. Not for the first time, I’ll wonder why I invited him.

  While we’re waiting for Dad to change out of his wet shoes, my supervisor and I will sit on the uneven rocks and look back to the mainland.

  ‘Listen to that,’ he’ll say, and we’ll hear the call of a white-bellied sea eagle. ‘I heard they were nesting.’ The lines round his eyes will expand and contract.

  When Dad is ready, we’ll climb up into the forest. We’ll be following one of the steep, narrow basalt dykes that run west to east across the island: a fold in the hill marked out by a line of cabbage palms. We’ll clamber up an almost-track, trying to avoid being stabbed by the spurs of the palm stems. We’ll pass a metal sign, salt-bleached, that says:

  NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY. Access to the island is closely monitored. Maximum penalty $660,000 or two years imprisonment, or both.

  My supervisor will be a few bounds above, still nattering about the rabbits and Danysz’s trials with microbes of chicken cholera. ‘He found that it wasn’t contagious to rabbits,’ he’ll call down to us, ‘but the rabbits certainly—here. This is what I’m talking about.’ He’ll crouch next to a tall round-trunked tree and reach into the mulched leaves. ‘Birdlime,’ he’ll say, looking up the length of sturdy trunk. ‘The rabbits ate the understorey so the birdlime fruit fell to the ground, so birds were exposed to the seeds which should have been entangled in shrubbery. Here.’ He’ll offer a birdlime calyx—a thin, grooved tube, like a withered frangipani—to my breathless father.

  Dad won’t want to accept it, but he will take the calyx in his hand, and I’ll watch him stretch the viscous syrup between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Gums up the birds’ wings so they can’t fly,’ my supervisor will say. I’ve seen pictures of the affected birds: the calyx sticking out of their feathers like pierced arrows. ‘Eventually, the bird starves to death.’ My supervisor will tramp higher. ‘When ecologists came here in the eighties,’ he’ll call, as we follow, ‘the forest was jammed with birdlimes.’ He’ll chuckle at his pun. ‘So bad that the nesting pairs were down to less than 250. So it wasn’t just a matter of eradicating the rabbits. We didn’t need to make a drastic change. All we needed to remove was thirty-four plants and their seed
lings in the breeding ground. By the mid-nineties the undergrowth was regenerating and the population upswinged to—here we are.’

  On a ledge on the hill, camouflaged among the trees, there’ll be a fibreglass structure, like a mutant pumpkin. It’s called the igloo. Apple-green, it has round porthole windows and window shades like eyelids. My supervisor will unclamp the padlock from the door. Inside will be a cramped space, just enough for two storage shelves: one holding sunscreen, WD-40 and Aerogard; the other a ragtag library of bird books, collected shells, and bird skeletons and feathers. Around the edge will be three compact bunks for us to sleep on. ‘Home sweet home,’ my supervisor will say.

  My father will waver next to the trunk of a cabbage palm.

  My supervisor will have clambered into the igloo. I’ll finish his story for him. ‘That was one of the success stories. By the late nineties we had more than a thousand breeding pairs.’

  In the hush of the rainforest my dad will ask, ‘And now?’

  My supervisor will be clattering about inside. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ I’ll say.

  We’ll get to work immediately. My supervisor will be doing his own side project in the other gully. When I ask him about it, he’ll mutter some words I won’t catch—it’ll sound like a scientific name, a phrase in Latin. Before I get the chance to say ‘What?’, he’ll have moseyed away over the fig-tree roots. ‘Aves’ something. ‘Bird’ something. I’ll gather up the materials we need—head torches and the nest record sheets—and my father and I will head in the opposite direction.

  Gould’s petrels are the only gadfly petrel that don’t burrow. They nest in natural cavities under the toscanite scree or among the buttresses of fig trees. Sometimes they nest beneath dried cabbage-tree fronds that have fallen to the ground. On Cabbage Tree we’ve got a good record of the nests. We’ve been demarcating them for years. Each nest has its own indicator tied to a metal stake—those pink, blue, green, yellow numbered pendants they use to tag cattle. The data sheet my dad will carry into the bush—laminated in plastic but a bit frayed—will be based on a list compiled by the team way back in the nineties, but it’s still accurate. GPs form long-term partnerships, and nest sites are used by the same birds in successive years. The birds fly off after fledging. They return to almost precisely the same spot they were hatched from. Dad and I will be tracking down a series of nests: looking to see if they’re still intact; if there’s anyone at home and, if so, one bird or two; is there an egg or, even, has it hatched? With the change in mean temperatures over the last ten years I’ll be wanting to gauge its effect on breeding times and cycles.

  The nests are often clumped together, sometimes within a few metres of each other. Not all the nests will be marked: there was a decision in the noughties to focus on the breeding cycle of only the known-aged birds: the birds we have banded and followed for years. We don’t know exactly the lifespan of the GPs, but we have a bird—R025—that was banded way back in the 1980s, even before my supervisor’s time on the island. As we zigzag up the hill, hopping from rock to shaky rock, we’ll have passed several potential nest sites, but I won’t have told my dad about them. I’ll know that this knowledge would paralyse him: he’d stand there, among the mat rush, petrified that he’ll accidentally crunch an egg.

  We’ll traipse higher, passing fronds of palms that spindle on the ground like large paper spiders. Tangled roots will hang down from the canopy. Even as we undertake our work my dad will pussyfoot anxiously over the rough ground, clasping the data sheet like it’s his protective coating. The record sheets allow us to locate the nests: next to each listing is a set of coordinates that places the site in relation to its nearest neighbours. We’ll have a system in place: my father will be acting as the ‘driver’, calling out the name of the next nest while I’ll scramble over the scree searching for it. They’re not always easy to find: the undergrowth will be taking hold and sometimes a nest will be well hidden among the bushes. ‘Green 265,’ Dad will cry thinly, ‘south of Yellow 027, three metres; west of Blue 568, five metres.’ He’ll reach out and grab a native plum tree to steady himself. I’ll spy the tag—it’ll indicate the hollow in a fallen palm trunk—and crouch down to reach into the dark space.

  As we work I’ll tell Dad about another Gould’s petrel success story, what my supervisor calls the second recovery program. It’ll be why I want to include the species in my research. When I’m an undergrad my supervisor will give a lecture on the programs established by his team back in the early 2000s. ‘The creation of conservation reserves won’t in fact save species from extinction,’ he’ll claim, ‘We need highly focused and effective recovery actions.’

  After the eradication of the rabbits and the reduction of the birdlime threat, my soon-to-be-supervisor developed a targeted translocation plan. Near-fledged birds were taken from Cabbage Tree to form a satellite colony on nearby Boondelbah Island, a small circular crag.

  Under the sleepy lights of the lecture hall, my soon-to-be-supervisor will shape the island with his hands. The other students will be playing games on their smartpads, but I’ll be listening. My nearly-supervisor will tell me about Boondelbah Island: its cliffs to the north and a basalt dyke to the south which has eroded to create a deep ravine and ocean bay. He’ll explain how his team of ecologists are constructing artificial nests: boxes of Brunswick-green plastic, the entrance tunnel a section of polyethylene pipe. The project was not without its challenges. Birds selected for translocation needed to be taken after they had reached maximum mass, but before they emerged from their burrow. Birds chosen closer to fledging would have reduced the mortality rate, but the older the bird, the greater their philopatry—their ability to return to the nest. ‘They GPS themselves,’ my supervisor will say with a grin.

  A friend will type something on her pad and the words ‘lame who uses gps anymore’ will pop up on my screen. Despite the risks, the majority of birds adapted to their new environment. The second iteration of the program met with a 100 percent success rate, with all nestlings successfully fledging after transfer. The removal of the young appeared to have no discernible effect on the breeding productivity of their parents: in fact, with the dispatching of their young, the pair could leave the island in more robust condition.

  Sitting in the stuffy lecture hall, watching my nearly-supervisor flap enthusiastically, will change me forever. The undergrad years will have been a dark time for me: class after class on extinctions and yet more extinctions; encroachments on habitats; birds drowning in oil spills or choking on plastic. I’ll feel myself slipping into a world I don’t want to inhabit—a world I’ve seen on my father’s face and in my father’s stories. But this man will be telling me a different narrative, one where even plastic can transform into something productive, something protective. ‘The irony is,’ he’ll say, ‘GPs could not only breed successfully in plastic nest boxes, but breeding success in these artificial nests was greater than in natural ones. And the use of plastic greatly increases the lifespan of the nest.’

  My father’s map will have directed us to one of these boxes. A stake in the ground will confirm that we’ve arrived at R346. The box will be half-submerged amongst the toscanite. I’ll lift the rock we use to secure the lid and open the box. I’ll hear a body shift underneath. I’ll open the internal lid and stick my hand in. Many GPs are placid; this one not so much. ‘Ah yes, Reddy 346,’ my supervisor will say, casually, later that night, ‘he’s the crankiest on the island.’ My arm will recoil from the bite and R346 will give a disgruntled squawk, but then we’ll both compose ourselves. The bird’s round black eye will look into mine.

  ‘Come and have a look, Dad,’ I’ll say. My father will keep his distance. As gently as I can, I’ll clutch him around the wings, my palm against the oily grey back, my fore- and middle-fingers around his neck. My other palm will steady the bird’s bat-wing feet. I’ll take note of the number on the metal band around his leg. The ashen face will tremble and the smooth black beak will twist.
Inside the box, amongst a few shredded palm fronds, will be the egg, gleaming and smooth. Before I replace the struggling bird, I’ll say, ‘Come and have a look, Dad.’ But his white face will twitch like the bird, and his feet will remain rooted amongst the rocks.

  It’ll be the same face he’ll make, the same stance he’ll hold, a month before our visit to the island. The sale of the house will have gone through and he’ll be standing in the backyard under the shade of the old spotted gum tree. I’ll have spent the morning doing the final wiping down of the surfaces and the sweeping of the veranda. He’ll have stood in the garden looking at the tree. I’ll have been patient, understanding, fulfilling the promise to my mother to humour him, to protect him. But everyone has their limits. ‘Dad, you have to do something.’ He’ll still not budge. So my decision to ask him here won’t really be an invitation, more of an enforced recovery plan. I’ll draw up the list of essential items for him and fill his backpack and shove him into the car for the journey north. I’ll cajole him into the boat. All the while, he’ll be like a branch of petrified wood. All the while, I’ll wonder why I’m doing this.

  Towards the end of the afternoon we’ll need a break so I’ll lead him right up the hill, through the dense trees until we emerge into the sunshine at the top of the cliff. It’s a spectacular view: you don’t realise how claustrophobic it can be under the canopy until you face the expanse of the grey ocean and the flat blue sky. Dad won’t want to go too close to the edge so he’ll hold back, half-submerged in the bush. I’ll stand on the rock shelf so I can get a better view of Cathedral Rock. It’s actually a separate islet linked to the island by a boulder field: a tower of basalt adjacent to the island, like a craggy lighthouse. I’ll want to see if the Peregrine falcon is nesting there this season. I won’t be able to see the nest, but there’ll be enough guano splattered down the sides of the tower to indicate her residency. My father will crawl out a little further and he’ll wedge himself next to me. The wind will be light and the air fresh and clear. I won’t expect a conversation from him, and I won’t get one. Together, separately, we’ll look out at the ruffling water.