Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,36

a nearby tree.

Egg one is still largely intact.

Egg two has a large fracture

and I heard,

distinctly,

the tapping of the egg-tooth against the shell

and the imprisoned bird

croaking

as if requesting assistance.

It is the first time

I have been addressed by an egg.

A lot of action today;

comings and goings.

On the ground, directly beneath the hollow,

a small rubble of shell.

Even considering some shell

may have been eaten,

or not ejected from the nest,

or carried off by another animal,

when I attempted a reconstruction

one egg

was all I got.

I think we can safely say

that egg two was never fertilised

and didn’t hatch.

The tink tink of the bellbirds

is a constant backdrop

to the day.

The kookaburras assemble and call

as the sun slips from the trees.

Then there is quiet for a while.

It’s only later

that an owl announces herself

out of the dark.

A change in the family is noted.

An added excitement and cohesion,

a lot of chorusing in wild bouts

throughout the day.

As if they are announcing to the district

this addition to the family

and congratulating each other

on the hatching.

I won’t climb again

so as not to disturb the bub,

or risk a beak

in the back of my skull.

It seems plausible to consider

that birds were the architects for trees.

A hollow,

or a fork,

for every nesting cradle;

a branch for every grip.

And they designed a structure

to which insects are naturally attracted,

like women to the shops.

Twenty days it takes,

before the bub

appears at the lip of the nest.

Squat and glum

– a greasy piece of equipment,

more echidna than bird,

with its pin feathers sheathed in their quills.

Mum makes no attempt to clean the nest chamber.

It must be bedlam in there

after a month of shit

and leftovers.

Club-Toe is an atrocious feeder.

She drops her catch

just outside the nest,

or brings up a leaf or a twig.

When left in charge she deserts her post.

But sometimes I see her,

staring dolefully into the chamber,

nest-struck,

love-lorn,

jealous?

Dad caught a fence skink this afternoon,

a good six inches long.

He flew it home

stopping twice for a breather,

and perched on the edge of the nest

to feed it in.

Then he sat and watched

as every few minutes an inch or so

of skink

was hoicked up

into the nest.

I didn’t get a good look at the bub,

but it must be a corker

to swallow such a meal.

Betty had a rabbit knitted out of grey wool. Her brother had a parrot, only he wasn’t meant to have it, being a boy and being older, so the parrot had no name. The outside of the parrot was covered in green corduroy. Inside there was sawdust that smelled musty and damp when it rained and made them sneeze when they threw it around. Mostly they had the rabbit and the parrot in their beds, but if they went out playing a pretend picnic, a pretend family, or some sort of pretend sport, they took them with them. The rabbit was called Kit and Betty loved it.

Betty’s mother had a long, sad face with wide-set eyes. Betty’s father said, ‘Mother, you have a face on you like a camel. Can’t you smile, Mother?’ Her teeth were bad from cough medicine so she tried not to smile and if she did smile she put her hand up so it looked instead like she’d had a shock.

There were curtains with marigolds on them and a hallstand for hats and umbrellas. The tips of the umbrellas sat in a metal cup. After it had been raining and a wet umbrella had been dripping Betty and her brother would take turns in drinking the tinny umbrella water from the cup. They were a year apart. He was older, but he was slow to talk and she was slow to walk which evened things up.

The father sold curtains in a department store in Melbourne and walked to work or, if it was threatening rain, caught the tram. He didn’t have a briefcase; he had a newspaper folded long and slim in his hand like a bat. Sometimes he brought material home folded up inside the newspaper. He unwrapped the newspaper on the kitchen table and showed Betty how it had been folded just perfectly so it came to the edges, but not enough so as to stick out. The material was smooth again as soon as he unfolded it, no wrinkles. There was a green and blue check which became her new pinafore and more of the marigolds for cushion covers. When Betty saw a man on the street with a flat newspaper she tried to guess what colour material he had in it and what it would be made into.

Betty was the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow. She sat on her father’s lap when he got home from