Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,40

saw a dead baby rat hanging in the fork of a bush. Our teacher said a butcher bird had probably left it there for later.

August

There are six nests in the trees near the bins. Five are in the trees. One is on top of the water tank cover.

To-day we wrote a bird list for our school and did a graph of it.

September

We found a baby mudlark on the ground behind the shelter sheds. It has been very windy and we think it was blown out of the nest. We can’t see the mother. We brought it inside and our teacher put it in her desk drawer on the duster cloth. We aren’t allowed to keep looking at it.

The baby mudlark is still alive. We made a shoebox for it to live in and the teacher feeds it sugar water with an eye dropper. It can be very noisy when it is hungry.

To-day we had a competition and the baby mudlark is called Smudgy. My name was Lord Feathers but it only got one vote. Smudgy comes out of his box sometimes and sits on a plate on the teachers desk. He squawks when we go past.

Smudgy can stand up properly and walk a few steps but he tips over a lot and falls on his beak. It is very hard to feed Smudgy because our fingers are too big to go down his throat. We use a crochet hook with a fly on the end of it.

October

To-day we put Smudgy outside on the grass under a laundry basket. Smudgy is trying to catch his own flies now. We saw him with a grasshopper in his beak but it might have been already a dead one.

To-day when Smudgy was outside we saw a butcher bird flying nearby and the teacher went and brought him back inside.

When he is in the classroom Smudgy likes to stay close to Mrs Marmalade, the school cat.

November

The dentist is visiting and Smudgy likes the dental van. He goes inside and pecks at the drills and mirrors. We had to catch him and keep him inside when the dentist was leaving.

To-day a new bird came to the bird table. We are not sure what it was but we drew pictures of it. It was small and sang with a silvery note.

To-day our teacher said she thinks Smudgy is a female because she has white eyebrow feathers and white under her beak. When we were cleaning out Smudgy’s box we found a lot of hard pellets with bits of wings and cricket legs. The pellets were hidden under the straw.

To-day Smudgy flew from the teachers table to the library corner. It wasn’t very straight but she landed well. We all clapped. She is very beautiful now.

A kind lady is minding Smudgy and Mrs Marmalade over the long weekend. The lady collected Smudgy in a shoe box. My special cousin who is an albino is coming to stay with us.

When we came to school this morning our teacher told us that our Smudgy had been killed. We don’t think it was Mrs Marmalade because she is always sleeping. The other thing I didn’t say about Smudgy is that she liked our teacher’s earrings. Her favourite ones were the white ones. They are made of plastic and shine when they catch the sun.

Shirley Timms wins the nature diary prize with a picture of Smudgy made from uncooked rice. Hazel Reynolds comes second. Harry leans against the gate and reads Little Hazel’s nature diary while she runs Foot Foot through her exercises. With her black school shoes and white ankle socks Little Hazel’s feet look like another set of hooves skimming over the cape weed. Both girl and heifer are breathing hard when they return to the gate. Harry smiles at her and straightens the collar of her school blouse. ‘Well, you’re a chip off the old block,’ he says.

Little Hazel gives Harry the nature diary to keep. In return he buys her a pair of her very own binoculars – they are the same as Michael’s, but in a tan leather case.

Little Hazel checks on Foot Foot from her bedroom window when she wakes in the morning and sometimes turns the binoculars in the direction of Mues’s place over the road.

Michael uses his binoculars to look down Dora’s blouse when they go out picking mushrooms together.

Betty sometimes borrows the children’s binoculars and stands on the back step scanning the paddocks thereabouts.

Harry’s binoculars hang from a brass hook in his kitchen.