by Sharyn Munro
Birdcalls do begin to interpret themselves as speech, and I can’t hear them any other way once that happens. Even bird books, when trying to approximate the calls, sometimes use actual words, the choice of which can only be subjective. In my book the Red Wattlebird is credited with saying ‘chock a lock’. Now why would anybody hear a bird say that? At least ‘I got the lot!’ makes sense.
I suppose I only pick up on the choruses of the birdcalls, as they are the parts most often repeated. So what seems to be their very limited conversational range may be my very limited auditory discrimination, or due to my very considerable ignorance. I have tried listening to birdcall tapes to educate myself, but I drift off after a while.
Certainly repetitive is the call of the Willy Wagtail, who unceasingly compliments everybody and everything, or perhaps it’s himself he’s talking about—a treetop Narcissus? ‘Pretty pretty, pretty! Pretty, pretty, pretty!’ Others, who repeat their calls so unvaryingly that I find myself wishing they’d get an answer and shut up, are treetop dwellers that I haven’t been able to see, and thus haven’t identified.
One is the sociable bird who greets all comers with ‘Hello mate! Hello mate!’ A bit of a stutterer, he sometimes has trouble getting past the ‘Hello ... hello ... hello...’, but he’s very persevering for, if I listen long enough, a few minutes later he triumphantly gets out the final ‘...mate!’ I can’t tell if it’s him or a sympathetic mate who often lets out a long, relieved ‘Whe-e-e-w!’ after such feats.
Then there’s the bird who’s a contemplative type, doesn’t like to give too hasty an opinion, so he goes to the other extreme, ‘I think ... I think ... I think it can!’ He varies this with a more positive judgement, delivered in a WC. Fields descending tone, ‘I like it ... I like it ... I like it w-e-ell.’
Many of the little birds speak far too softly and quickly for me to catch any of it. The blue Fairy Wrens and their brown consorts are often in the wisteria vine on my verandah, a few metres beyond my computer, but they’re never still for long. Little birds mostly get about in big groups, fussing, fluttering, never sitting still for more than a second, always chattering and twittering and tinkling. Like the various Thornbills and Weebills, who mimic a handful of yellow-turning leaves being perpetually tossed up in the air to flutter quickly down, or the Grey Fantails, who dart about to land here and there for a quick, proud spin-on-the-spot to display their pretty tails.
Most voluble of all are the kookaburras, but they laugh too much to actually say anything. They start the day off with a rousing dawn chorus of belly laughs and cackles, tailing off into small half-suppressed chuckles; they sit around all day watching for, catching and scoffing worms, meet a few of their mates now and then for a quick snigger and then as the twilight is about to fade one of them decides It’s time and begins the big event: the evening chorus. He never gets past one solitary bar before his mates start to join in, pointing their big beaks to the sky, throats vibrating, the volume swelling as they all get in on the act, till suddenly the hidden conductor gives the ‘Cut!’ signal and they drop into silence. But whether someone asks for an encore, or the keener ones just feel like it, sometimes they’ll have a second, less substantial, go. There appears to be a few irrepressible ones amongst them who will not take direction and find it hard to make that final note final, who just have to give one more salutary chuckle to the last of the light.
Farthest down the line when the singing talents were handed out were the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos. They don’t come often, but they are very big and very raucous, so when they fly over or sit in my nearby trees for a spell, usually when it’s wet and misty, all else gets drowned out. They sound like something mechanical that badly needs oiling. Yet they were at the head of the queue when the magnificence rations were being doled out, for they’re impressively beautiful—oversized for the branches they perch on, regally deliberate in their movements, glossy black feathers stiffly sculptured.
I once came across two of them sitting in a low branch of an old forest she-oak, neatly cracking open the woody ‘nuts’. They took no notice of me standing not 6 metres away, but continued calmly with their feast, each with one claw clamped to the branch, the other claw manipulating one nut after another up to the hooked beak to break the hard seed pod compartments open and prise out the seeds. Low squawks every now and then expressed approval of the quality of this year’s crop.
The Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo is a little less grating of voice, but there’s only one who passes over here, and when he does, it’s early morning, flying from east to west, and back again around sunset, uttering no more then one or two screeches. He’s been doing the same for nearly 30 years—at least I assume it’s the same bird, as they are very long-lived. The mundane theory is that he’s a scout, checking crops for readiness to call in the flock for a feast. My dad had so many of them round his last farm that he used to plant a third more corn that he needed, factoring in what the cockatoos would eat. But I think my cocky’s a tragic figure, not content to join the great white flocks eating farmers’ corn and decorating dead gum trees, condemned to wing his lonely way. Shades of Jonathon Livingstone Seagull—is he another fellow weirdo?
I’m glad I have flocks of Crimson Rosellas instead. Gorgeous enough visually as they flash past, rich red with blue and black, they are also near the top of the musical scale, with several sweet and lyrical passages as part of their wide repertoire. They are a delight to hear as they call to each other back and forth across the bowl and around the rim. They also make less delightful squawks, especially when they have a barney over whose turn it is at the bird feeder on the verandah.
From my desk I can see them now, in the ‘window’ that I keep clipped back amongst the vines near the feeder. This is a large upturned black plastic pot plant saucer, with holes drilled in it, which I’ve screwed to a protruding crosspiece that I screwed to the railing. Another of those male projects that didn’t get done until I was male-less, it’s rough, a little wobbly, but it works. I toss a handful of parrot seed in there now and then, or a sunflower head from the garden, just to keep the birds interested, not dependent.
The rosellas sometimes fly the length of my verandah, under its roof, shooting out the far end ‘doorway’ amongst the vines; or perch on the guttering, tails hanging below it, now and then twisting upside-down, so a beak and two bright eyes come into my view instead.
When a currawong lands in the bird feeder, it fixes the rosellas with a yellow eye and they vacate but don’t move far, just to the backs of the chairs at the nearby table. If a magpie arrives, red eye fixes on yellow eye, they both fluff up and look mean, and the currawong backs off, to another chair.
Alfresco dining thus requires removal of bird shit first; it’s strong stuff, and since I recently sanded and repainted those yellow chairs, I’m not happy to see paint come off along with the black-and-white drips and drops. Still, it’s worth it for times such as when we are sitting at the table and several brilliant jewels of rosellas land beside us to feed, only a few feet away. Welcome!
‘Aren’t they tame!’ a visitor might exclaim. The rosella cocks an eye at him. ‘Aren’t you!’ it might be thinking. They aren’t tame at all, merely unafraid, under our established rules of live and let be. If I were to approach the feeder while they were there, instead of going about my own business, they’d fly off at once.
Because I spend so much time at my desk, I am intimate with this view through the window in front. It’s an old window, with coloured bubble glass side panels of amber and green and three small coloured panes at the bottom of the lower sash—green, rose and amber—the very same colours as were in my courthouse windows. I can see two yellow chair backs and a crescent of round table, a weathered timber post and railings, layers of wisteria and grape leaves in sunlit patterns and depths of green, the birdfeeder, and birds feeding.
As autumn advances, the wisteria leaves turn from green to butter yellow, but not all together, so echoing my green and yellow window-panes, and the ye
llow chairs. The ornamental grape leaves go through a riot of shades of pink, red, burgundy and copper. When pink predominates I often place a faded-to-rose lace tablecloth on the oak table, purely for the visual pleasure of the synchronicity of colours. Dyed years ago to hide a claret stain, its usual role is to cover my little TV set, since high-tech black does not suit my rustic cabin.
By winter all the leaves are gone. My view is more open, an intricate pattern of twisted and arching brown stems framing wider views of my tree rim. Its leafy summer cover gone, the translucent sheet in the roof lets in the sun once more; as the sun angle lowers, sunlight reaches my window and my desk. The verandah is used less, the yellow chairs soldier on, often mist-drenched, until they’re needed in spring.
I’m fond of these plain wooden chairs, bought some years ago for $2 each in an op-shop. The cheery paint protects them—and renders the table even more reproachful. Of sturdy oak construction, it’s been with me for over 35 years. Sealed and oiled long ago, it’s now slowly turning black from the elements; it needs, and deserves, better protection from my mountain mists and sunshine. That job is on a list, the ‘hard’ one, as sanding it will be slow—gripping a sanding block tightly is not possible for long without protest from my thumbs.
When the verandah is free of greenery, kookaburras frequently use the railings as vantage points for spotting the minute activity in the grass that signifies a worm, so I can admire their intricate feather patterns up close. Like the rosellas, they don’t move if I walk past on the verandah. Compared to a worm, what am I after all?
Nor are the magpies bothered by my passing, but then, as the bosses, they wouldn’t be. The kookaburras don’t actually sing while on my verandah, but the maggies do. Magpies seem to have ‘got the lot’: good looks, great flying skills, and top singing talent. And they really do sing, aiming their voices skywards, warbling in unison. They seem to enjoy it as much as I do. Unlike the rosellas’ whistled tunes, I can’t imitate the magpie song to talk back to them. I’ve tried, but it was like gargling while making the French uvular ‘r’. I think I’d need a different throat.
Another songbird, heard only occasionally, is the Grey Shrike-thrush. Her rich, pure melody catches the ear immediately and I go looking for her. As at Birrarung, she is shy. Soft-grey toned, she has a large head and a large dark eye, less ‘birdlike’ in the gimlet sense, so she gives an appearance of gentleness.
The blue-black Satin Bowerbird used to only bring his large harem of olive-green females here in summer, the stone fruit season, until a few years ago. It was spring, and I was on the verandah with my then three-year-old granddaughter, when we heard a creaking whirring call. ‘That’s an odd one, ’ I said. ‘Could it be a rosella?’ My granddaughter shook her head in pity at my ignorance. ‘No, Grandma, that’s a bowerbird!’ As of course it was, instantly recognisable as soon as she said it but, out of season, out of context, my brain hadn’t computed it while hers, less rigid, had.
Far more loftily removed from all the noise and squabble down here—mostly—are the three Wedge-tailed Eagles who lord it over these mountains. Elegantly, lazily, they circle over us on the air currents, barely moving a wing. At times so high as to be mere specks, at others low enough for me to see the colours under their mighty curved wings.
For years I didn’t, or couldn’t, hear their plaintive calls, so didn’t know they spoke, but perhaps it took me a few years to rid my ears and head of the ingrained city-noise and city-ness. Their call doesn’t fit the image of the fierce and mighty hunter. My bird book describes it as ‘pseet-you, pseet-you’; it is a very thin piping. When I first connected it to them I thought one must have been hurt, somewhere in the trees below me, and the other was fretting. Perhaps when I hear it a lot it is actually a young one? Unbecoming as it is, toddler eagles might be whingers too.
If the eagles are kings of the upper reaches of the sky, the magpies have a clear opinion of where their dominion ends, and 6 metres above the treetops is far too close to the border. They are harried noisily and fearlessly away by the magpies, like yapping fox terriers shooing a lumbering bull. Eagles aren’t good at quick evasive action and must manipulate their large wings with unaccustomed frequency to move up and out of this enemy airspace and back into their own thinner air.
I have surprised eagles on the track with their prey. So close, the immense size of their legs is a shock, bringing with it the reality of how much weight they can carry. One day when my daughter was small, her hair blonde like the tussocks and she about the same height, an eagle came so low to investigate that I worried it might think her a plump rabbit, swoop down and pick her up. It easily could have.
But there is an intruder into the airspace of both eagle and magpie before which they are powerless, and so am I—military jets in training, F-111s. I was assured by the military that they only allow this intrusion eight times a year, but that’s still too much.
Living on a mountain, you often find yourself looking down on things that would be more usually looked up to. Like the white sea of mist in the valley, or the moon skulking along behind the downhill trees. But to see these jets zoom past down there is another matter. My bowl feels very frail under the impact as they break the sound barrier. I have to be quick to catch a glimpse of the small dark shapes, usually two of them, one after the other, their lights quick-winking dots as they flash past.
It’s shocking enough when they appear so violently over the top, across the sky’s edge, but it’s worse when I see them so low, often tilted sideways, through the V-shaped chip in the tree rim of my bowl, because then they are against a backdrop of mountainside. I know that out there they are hurtling amongst convoluted peaks and ridges and valleys, trusting their computerised instruments, their remote pilots, their radar, to think and react and steer and veer! They must assume nothing could ever go wrong, yet this year it was on the news that a wheel fell off one just after take-off. High tech, huh?
The army says this area was chosen for training because it is remote and only sparsely populated. Having chosen it myself partly for those reasons, I am not happy to be dismissed as an irrelevant sparse population. Like the indigenous people around Maralinga, where they did the nuclear tests?
But by ‘population’ they only mean people, and therefore don’t take into account how the other inhabitants handle being terrorised by these sudden blasts of unnaturally loud noise. My heart lurches every time, my hands fly to my ears, my face winces, my body involuntarily huddles—even though I know what the noise is. Wallabies scare easily; I’ve heard of them dropping dead from panic and fear. And 15 or 20 metres closer, what must it do to a small bird, or her nestlings?
However, ‘not happy’ is inadequate to describe my feelings when the jets have flown towards me. I stood and watched incredulously as the first jet came, nose scooping hard as it appeared from between a fold in the ridge opposite my bowl, heading up the slope towards my V-gap, pointing directly at me, then belly exposed as it sped in, up and over my astonished house and me. It is impossible not to be unnerved as such heavy, fallible metal things zoom at me, so low I could see the pilot’s face if the thing was going at a fraction of the speed.
But that leaves 357 days a year of mostly uncivilised and undisturbed sky.
I look up as much as I look down. The highest mountain opposite me, to the north, is over 1600 metres. As much part of the sky as the land, it has a great affinity with clouds, so I am treated to a perpetually changing visual feast. Clouds may keep passing by over all the rest of the sky, but one will often hook on this high peak and slew sideways, so that it billows anew on the eastern flank, streaming out and airbrushed smooth by the currents flowing over the top, sculpted into a white extension of the mountain itself.
If I’m lucky there’ll be a pile-up of clouds there at sunset, so high that it reflects the glow from the ‘real’ western sunset opposite, even though the land below has already lost the light of day. Then I get a double spectacular. The clouds transmute the bold west’s r
eds and oranges, yellows and purples, hot pinks and bright bronzes, into a subtler beauty, of puffs and streaks of pale gold, soft pinks and lilacs like the insides of shells, and rare blues of intense purity, like those in the background skies of early Italian paintings.
I look from one to the other, not wanting to miss the fleeting variations in either effect.
When the higher northern show has faded to dusky grey, I can turn undistracted to the west to see the last act of the drama, the darker stages of deeply bruised purple flags of clouds, brilliantly lit and edged with gold from below, streaming out across a sky that shades in colour from apricot to vermilion at the world’s edge, behind the black filigree of my gum-tree edging.
Talk about food for the soul.
So far from artificial lights, my night sky is unsullied, the moving lights of distant planes less common than falling stars. I literally reel from the starry dome above on moonless nights, and it’s one reason why I’d never want an indoor toilet. Blokes get to stargaze when they wander outside to water the grass. They do this naturally, but ladies need encouragement—like no choice!
Even indoors, from my bedside windows, stars rule. After I turn out my reading light, I don’t close my eyes until they have adjusted to the darkness and the stars become visible. When I see so many that there is no blackness in between, only degrees of more distant, fainter stars, I can sleep, heart-eased with the renewed knowledge that wonders still exist that are unspoilt by man. I ignore the niggling pessimism of the voice in my head that says, ‘Give him time.’
Yet I’m equally taken with the mystery of my bowl under the pale bright beauty of a full moon. It’s hard to close my eyes then for, as the night progresses, the moon and its shadows transform every shrub and tree, call to brilliance each white flower, and strike silver from any pool or bowl of water. I wake at intervals to see what magic is going on out there, and I’d never be surprised at strange shapes slipping by.
