Blooms are appearing on the wattles by the side of the road and on the tree in the middle of the yard. The activity of the birds increases, week by week, as they intuit the coming of spring. Birds that I don’t know in this dry sandstone country, so different to the rolling hills and green valleys, rainforest, rivers and creeks of Gloucester. I have to start again with our massive, cumbersome Cayley’s What bird is that? ($20 at a second-hand shop many years ago – a purchase that seemed Quixotic at the time – pointless folly – but which has given us hours of entertainment and illumination, even when it has to be cross-checked with the two volumes of A field guide to Australian birds by Peter Slater).
A black and grey flycatcher in the wattle darts out and then, as if it realises it has forgotten something, darts back to the tree. There’s a black and white treecreeper on the gums behind the house, then on the poles near the pizza oven, making its hopping way up and around. When I went down to the chook house I walked past the canopy of a eucalypt full of silent silvereyes, giving themselves away only through the sudden flutter of their wings as they flew from branch to branch. From another tree nearby came a deep and melodious ‘whoo’, rising from ‘wh’ to ‘oo’: a white-headed pigeon, its large white belly puffed out. Closer to the house a different ‘whoo’ – a repetitive, shortened ‘whup whup’, very low, very rhythmic – a bird I’ve heard before and searched for in vain. It’s not the loud and proud wonga pigeon that we used to hear at Gloucester, its unstoppable call filling the valley, but almost the antithesis with its sombre, nearly sub-hearing vibratory noise.
Next to the house there is a little cloud of tiny birds in the eucalypt making their weightless way from leaf to leaf, searching, needle sharp and fast, for insects. Looking up towards the sun it’s hard to make them out, but maybe there are dots, and golden yellow bellies. Maybe they are weebills, or spotted or striated pardalotes. When I consult Cayley I think I can rule out the spotted pardalote, which is described as having ‘a monotonous call-note, like “slee-p ba-bee”’, as they cheeped constantly and vivaciously, but my imprecise ear hasn’t retained the difference between a ‘wit-e-chu’ (striated pardalote) or ‘weebill’ (weebill). Striated pardalotes would be so exotic! Even though they occur all over Australia, I’m yet to see one. I remember my upswelling of jealousy when a visitor to the farm told us of the pardalotes who return every year to his property in Victoria, to nest in a tiny gap in the wall of his house.
I haven’t had one full year here at Tapitallee yet, so I have no way of knowing how the bush has changed over the past 10, 20, 50 years. I can only observe the now. Yet, I’m sure it is changing.
Today’s news story from the Copernicus Climate Change Service says that it looks like July was the warmest July on record, following on from June having being the warmest June on record. Average temperatures in Europe were more than 2 degrees C above ‘normal’ (whatever that is now) and the global-average temperature was about 0.1 degrees C higher than the previous warmest in 2016. A graph on their website showing the daily average temperature for Europe in June has a dark line of dashes snaking above a tangle of other lines – the dark dashes represent 2019, the others represent every fifth year since 1979. The previous warmest year was 1999, but that never reaches the consistent heights of 2019. I can’t help but see the heavy black lines of the warmer years dominating the gentler pink and blue lines of other years, leading them to rise ever higher, a horrible metaphor for our world.
We can see now that climate change isn’t just affecting us this year, or last year, but for many years past. After many years denying the warnings of scientists, and more years believing it was way in the future, we are feeling, not the first faint stirrings, but the full and mature effects of a radical change to the climate.
