Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,8
of her wings clips the gatepost and she veers clumsily towards the mud. Harry shakes his head at her in exasperation, but he’s smiling as he rights the bike and checks it for damage. It’s something to be shared with Michael, although Harry is not sure Michael will be interested while young Dora is on the scene. Harry takes an old milk ledger from the bottom shelf in the dairy. The left-hand column is full of pencilled figures, but the right-hand column is blank throughout the book. It’s wide enough for a few notes, and it’s better than leaving the paper unused or buying a new book. Harry writes, ‘Observations of a Kookaburra Family at Cohuna’, and underlines it twice. He’s not sure about the pitch of it, or how to begin. So he imagines he’s talking birds with Michael, licks his pencil and starts to write.
The day starts in their throats.
Dad first, then Mum,
Tiny and Club-Toe.
The four of them in the red gum
by the dairy.
As regular as clockwork
they make their request for air.
Most afternoons
Mum and Dad nap in the old angophora.
The aunts take off –
flying the boundaries,
hunting,
spying on the neighbours.
But for several hours Mum and Dad
share a perch,
and do nothing at all.
They sit very still,
a couple of woody fruits
budded to the branch.
Jewel beetles,
longicorn beetles,
stag beetles,
chafers,
earwigs,
weevils,
spider – one leg only,
lizard – one almost complete,
bones of three others,
two mice mandibles,
six (v. large mouse or rat?) mandibles,
a long aquatic feeler – catfish, maybe a yabbie?
Three complete beaks,
one partial beak.
All of this in a handful of pellets
under the roost tree.
I sliced them open with my knife.
There’s a high percentage of waste,
but a beak isn’t like a mouth.
There’s no tongue for tasting.
Just some sort of mechanism
that decides what goes down,
and what comes up.
A spot of family boxing after the rain blows over.
Mum is challenged by Club-Toe.
She’s all bluster;
a bit of wing action,
some bobbing up and down on the branch,
a few jabs with her beak.
Mum stands her ground,
doesn’t move, doesn’t blink,
just turns her head towards the offensive.
After a while Club-Toe cracks the sulks
and flies off to a distant tree.
She’s back by teatime,
taking her place in the chorus,
singing her familiar lines.
Their primary address
is a large red gum by the dairy.
But they also reside
in your mum’s peppercorn,
in the bundy box in Mues’s front garden,
in the old angophora behind the channel,
in the sugar gums that line the driveway
and the road.
Mum and Dad I understand –
your typical marital pair.
But why do the ladies stay on?
Club-Toe and Tiny
are fully grown,
are fit enough to feed themselves.
They slope off during the day,
stray towards the boundaries,
do some show-off flying
where the neighbours can see.
Yet each dusk and dawn
they are back in the family chorus,
right on song.
When Mues was here the other day
he threw his cigarette butt away – still lit, of course.
Mum was watching us
from the roof of the tractor shed.
She flew down
and picked the butt up in her beak.
I had the cows in so I couldn’t follow her,
but she took it back to the roost tree, I’m sure of it,
for what –
a family smoke bath –
a delousing of the lot of them?
A high branch is chosen for hunting.
The kookaburra sits,
watching the ground,
waiting for something to move across its eye.
Then it drops through all that air;
silent, lead-beaked,
like an anchor through seawater.
Dad isn’t large, but he’s pretty;
the mask of dark feathers across his eyes,
the flash of blue on his rump.
A bandit-dandy.
He flies the boundaries in the mornings,
keeps the airy fences in place.
Then it’s preening and snacking
until the evening concert,
when he sounds the first note.
I get the sense that if he wasn’t there,
they wouldn’t sing at all.
Watching Tiny in the peppercorn
during the day.
She sits for hours,
motionless,
her beak splayed open,
waiting for something to pass across her eye.
She’s a vacant lot, that bird;
gormless,
I worry for her future.
Wing boxing,
sparring,
beak locking,
beak twisting and grasping
until one bird flies away,
or is knocked from the perch,
is constant throughout the year.
There’s a small family
across the road at Mues’s;
three birds only.
And to the west
a large noisy mob;
six at least.
When the air is dry and thin
(early February),
you can hear the river birds to the north.
I thought at first
they were an echo,
but when you get your ear in
it’s clear
that each family sings its own song.
Betty keeps a notebook in her handbag with a record of the children’s illnesses and accidents. When she arrives home in the evening after work and hears their voices, bored and ordinary in the kitchen, she feels a rush of relief. The children are safe. Another day has passed and she has not failed to keep them safe.
1945/46
Michael: Burns hair at stove, pecked