Birdlife

The owl visits the street wires when we don’t think about him. Where does he live? In a condemned building? Up in the nearby reserve? By the time we return from the house with a camera, he is gone.

Winter is when we notice any birds in the garden. They have gone away. They stay out of sight. A few about. Sometimes a currawong, not much. Time to think about birds.

In winter there is time to remember what will come again.

There is almost nothing in life as assuring as the reappearance of blue wrens, hopping in and out of the undergrowth in late winter.

Nor can anything improve on the unexpected cackle of kookaburras in distant trees from over the railway line. They come in this far from the hinterland maybe a dozen times a year, but none have visited the garden itself, yet.

Spring can turn violent. A nesting place under the bedroom eave will be invaded by mynahs. These picture-book birds, brought from India in ornate cages during the Victorian era, are a menace. For Melburnians their beauty is skin deep. They bully, frighten, and disperse the native birds. Once I found a mynah torn and killed in the front garden. It couldn’t have been the cat. My surprise was tempered by an indifference I do not feel usually, such is the acuteness of their vicious legend.

Could the killer possibly have been a wattlebird? They mark the territory, wherever they can hang from the curlicues of a grevillea or shout amidst cootamundra fronds. They have a nest somewhere around the house, but I haven’t figured out where. They seem to live in a bush near the water meter. I don’t want to know about it.

Summer is coming in when the magpies start loitering. They hop about in the she-oaks. They inspect the path, they will be happy with a mouse. The novelist Gerald Murnane lives in the same suburb. I cannot recall if he has written about birds, though I can be sure he has spent a lifetime bemused by no-nonsense magpies. The real Gerald Murnane, that is, not the Gerald Murnane who appears in his fictions. Murnane the writer is interested in human moods, so birds must feature somewhere.

Our suburb is under the flight path some weekends, depending on the whims of the controllers at Tullamarine. It is fun in our garden to spot a tail with a flying kangaroo, or the dragon or phoenix of certain Asian airlines. They have to be low. But other flight paths are also tracked, especially the occasional screeching clouds of sulphur-crested cockatoos, or the zoom of, were they, rosellas?

Fortunately for us there is a pigeon house in the next street. This means quiet. It means that in summer, but all year too, pigeons waddle down the side path, searching for seed. They are a benign presence. Their claws scratch the corrugated ripples of the tin shed, finding a footing. And when the heat rises they search for shade, making the soft mournful cooing that is the best barometer of the day moving inexorably into a heatwave. Bowls of cool water are left in the shade.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen visited Australia when he was in old age. He is renowned for making music that includes bird songs and once said, "My faith is the grand drama of my life. I'm a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none."

I think it odd that when he was here he chose to go to Sherbrooke Forest and copy out the calls of lyrebirds. Lyrebirds are mimics, known to imitate other bird songs, but even sounds of the forest like chainsaws and mobile phones. I keep looking out for Messiaen’s Australian compositions on CD, but am more content still listening to the sounds of my own garden.

If all artificial sounds in our world – radios, clocks, helicopters – went silent, nature left alone with the sounds, what would we hear? Insects twittering, leaves bristling, rain stopping, trees creaking, but mightily and most wondrously, best of all, the shrieks of the lorikeets. They arrive early on autumn mornings, when the gums flower. Climbing over the branches, their coat of many colours and raucous attention to business is like some cosmic joke to which even they don’t fully know the answer. Who cares? Something reconnects in the brain.

Autumn reminds us of rarity. We are captive to mortality. One day while washing up I noticed through the kitchen window, a large grey and white bird. It was an unknown, a stray maybe into these parts. It flapped along the top of the back palings, taking a rest? Transfixed, I waited till it departed. The glossy bird book, opened out on the table, rife with Latin names and feeding habits, said it was probably a cuckoo-shrike, nomadic across Australia and the archipelago to the North, though I couldn’t be completely sure. I measured the mystery of its arrival and departure on the tiny map included.

But more charmed than the drifter to my garden is the local who makes only rare appearances. Of these certainly the prize moment is at night, quietly, a visit from a wonder. It is a chunk of timber, a friend of the cold, and that shock of recognition. “Oh, hello!” I say correctly, as one does to someone deeply respected who suddenly enters vision. There is not a movement. Above the rooftops the moon is bright already. It is a tawny frogmouth. He outstares me, as if to say. “Who was here first?”