Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,25
They look obscenely sexual – testicular perhaps. He feels disconsolate and ashamed.
Just before breeding
the family tilts
on its axis.
Dad and Mum are selfishly involved.
There are outings together
around the territory;
the viewing of several nest options,
although,
for as long as I have known,
they always use the same hollow
in the red gum behind the dairy.
Club-Toe skulks;
flies solitary around the border,
sometimes ventures into rival country.
Or she just sits, torpid,
beak down,
eyes glazed.
I can only interpret it
as glumness.
An understanding, perhaps,
that she’s missed the boat again
and won’t be breeding this season.
A honeyeater,
tongue drunk
on nectar,
sleeps it off
beneath a flowering gum.
Until Dad, perched above,
notices the jerky
intoxicated cycling of its twiggy legs.
That’s supper sorted.
More border antics
with the neighbours today.
Mum and Club-Toe fly between
a sugar gum and the bundy box
watched by two scruff-heads from Mues’s.
One at a time
Mum,
then Club-Toe,
launch from a branch of the sugar gum
and fly towards a scar
on the box
doing an open-winged
bellyflop into it,
before pushing off again.
This goes on for some time
– the birds taking turns,
crossing in mid-air,
until they stop
and watch politely as the neighbours
mount their own display.
Kookaburras
are more likely to fly into windows
during the breeding season.
The mirrored reflection
is mistaken for an intruder,
and attacked,
without thought for personal safety
– or any concern
for the cost of glass.
Dad is attentive in the breeding weeks,
he takes Mum on outings around the farm,
chatters, brings her beetles,
jollies her along
while she ripens.
Until, this morning,
I hear her keening in agony
and rush out of the kitchen ready for rescue
to see her being
bored,
skewered,
on a low branch of the angophora.
Dad grips her neck and back,
tries to fly himself
inside of her.
The force of it tips them from the tree
and they tumble
in a double-winged free fall
to the ground,
where he pushes her against the cape weed.
And when he’s finished
flies away,
in silence.
They work in pairs
against a fairy wren.
Dad buzzes the nest,
the wren throws herself on the ground
to draw him away.
She pluckily performs her decoy
– holding out her wing as if it is broken.
A small bird on the ground
is easy picking,
Club-Toe finishes her off.
Mum went down in the dam today.
She miscalculated on the descent
and instead of braking
to pull a dragonfly
from the surface of the water,
she went in
and almost didn’t come out again.
This mistake must be easy enough to make
at the best of times,
even easier when you are egg-heavy
and hungry with it.
There is a trick they do,
an optical illusion,
when a goshawk flies overhead,
or a kite.
They sit perfectly still;
their head feathers erect,
their beaks wide open.
It breaks up the plump
bird-outline
and from above
gives the impression of a stick.
The rule of thumb
is to catch something
of a size to be swallowed,
or better still,
steal it.
A good-sized copperhead
down by the channel,
its jaws blocked up nicely with a rat,
is defenceless
– just a length of muscle.
Mum and Dad work together
harassing the snake about the head,
stabbing at its eyes.
Dad, a fat jockey on its back,
grasps with his claws
and drills with his beak
until,
in exasperation,
the snake drops the rat.
Dad lifts instantly,
Mum a second later,
kicking the rat up into her beak.
I’ve noticed a vibration just before the call,
as if the air is being tuned
to take delivery of the sound.
Perhaps I’m listening
too keenly
– perhaps my ears tense
as soon as they open their beaks
because I know
the air is about to flower?
A fracas in the bundy box.
Dad again.
The air is no good for sex,
you need gravity,
you need a sense of weight
and purchase.
This time I leave them to it.
I’d prefer he didn’t hurt her,
or at least,
I’d prefer not to see it.
Father Mulvaney comes to Acacia Court once a month to bless the Catholics. He’s from Dublin, via Swan Hill. Little, like a jockey, with dyed black hair and sharp lines on his tanned face, he talks non-stop and does a bit of singing and enjoys a port with lunch. Betty is cleaning the dentures with baking powder when he comes up behind her and slaps her on the rump. ‘Don’t get bitten by those choppers, my lovely,’ he says. He takes one of her wet hands in his. ‘You’ve beautiful hands, Mrs Reynolds.’ He strokes the back of her hand right down to her fingers like he’s patting the head of a dog, then he turns it over and stares down at the palm.
‘Did you know that the crucifixion wasn’t ever really through the hand? It’s a misunderstanding that we think that. When Jesus says to Thomas, “Observe my hands,” he really meant, “Observe my wrists.” A nail driven through the palm will be dragged out between the fingers by the weight of the body. So the crucifixion nails were hammered in here – just here between the small bones of the wrist.’ He pushes his thumb into Betty’s pulse. ‘And how are those children