Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,17
crossing the line somehow marks it
– reinforces that it exists.
Just three tonight:
Mum, Dad, Club-Toe.
Tiny is missing.
They sing the evening in regardless,
bend the sound around the branches,
finish with an operatic cackle.
Why the band of dark feathers across Dad’s face?
It veils the shining eye,
allows him to look without being seen
– to act in dim innocence.
On the banks of the channel I watch Dad
dive-bomb an ibis from behind.
He slams his bladed beak
into the back of ibis skull
– not to claim that bird
but so, in the instant of terror and surprise,
the tongs of the ibis beak open
and release a frog.
Dad predicts exactly where the frog will fall,
beaking it through the belly.
Why hunt when you can steal?
Tiny was killed
by the milk truck yesterday.
I found her body on the road.
She’d been cleaning moths
off the headlamps.
From a National Geographic at the dentist:
‘The lights of a car or motorcycle
are not so deadly
as the prevailing lights
of a lighthouse.
One night’s casualty list
at Eddystone, England:
76 skylarks
53 starlings
17 blackbirds
9 thrushes
and a few of
10 other species.’
It is a feature of many Australian farms
that timbered paddocks skirt the road.
We should encourage the bush
in pockets right across the land,
and along the water,
to allow safe passage
for our birds.
To my knowledge the kookaburra
does not undergo
a pre-nuptial moult.
Dad though, in early spring,
appears sprucer to my eye
with his gaudy smear of turquoise
at rump and shoulder.
And Mum is plumper, juicier
– the shape of a baked meatloaf.
Aerodynamics seems irrelevant
to these noisy tree dogs.
The sky has sufficient depth
to give each bird
its own strata,
its precise allocation of air.
Yet, like us,
they find it difficult
to live in peace.
Territorial adjustments
are constant
throughout the year.
But land grabs take place
just before breeding,
when more ground is needed to support
the expected chicks.
At breeding time a rogue bird
from a neighbouring family
will run the gauntlet
– crashing across the boundary,
hungry for territory,
for a start of their own.
The rogue is met in silence;
a flying dagger head-on,
from the side,
from behind.
The intruder is identified,
forced out,
better still – pushed to the ground
where the lower beak is ripped off.
Mum, Dad, Club-Toe
break off their
preening,
squabbling,
loafing,
to attack.
They lose themselves in the doing.
I struggle to tell them apart.
Knife-beaked,
cruel-eyed,
vicious;
there is no question
they would die for the family
– that violence is a family act.
‘My lovely hair,’ Betty says aloud as she goes out to collect the mail at Acacia Court. This happens sometimes: an involuntary spill of words. It is, Betty thinks, not ordinary speech where you can identify the recent thinking that produced the words, but the act of ‘being spoken’. When Betty is being spoken the words fall out in false cadence like lines from a play. She glances over her shoulder. The footpath is empty and it’s quiet out, except for the wind pulling at the paperbarks and giving the hydrangeas a clobbering against the fence. It is always just a few words; a snippet – sometimes a question. There are spiders in the rusty mailbox. She balances the envelopes in the crook of her arm and flicks the lid shut. Her other hand reaches up to pat a dry curl behind her ear. ‘My lovely hair.’
Betty remembers an incident from the week before: Little Hazel had been trimming the feathering around Foot Foot’s hocks with a pair of dressmaking scissors when she accidentally cut through the skin. Foot Foot is a heifer Harry brought over for Little Hazel to nurse because her front legs were twisted during a traumatic birth. Little Hazel brushes her and washes her and gives her physical therapy – lifting up one of her hind legs to make her take more weight up front. When the blood came up on Foot Foot’s hock Little Hazel ran across the paddock to fetch Harry. She was still crying when she returned with him, holding the plug of skin and cow hair in her hand and using the back of it to wipe her nose. Michael held the heifer’s head. Foot Foot didn’t show any signs of distress, except for holding the injured leg off the ground. The wound was a perfect circle, the size of an apricot, with the gummy pink meat of the hock poking through. Harry requested Dettol and they got the hearth stool for him to sit on as he worked. The flies were thick. Foot Foot swished her tail from side to side to shift them. Harry asked Betty to hold the heifer’s tail out of the way while he stitched. The next time the tail swished past Harry reached out for the thick swatch of cow hair and grabbed it in his fist. He handed it to Betty. She took it – the hair