Posted in Fifty words, Wildlife in the city
25 August 2020
The most eagerly anticipated thing was the ice-cream, but the park held surprises. A fence had been built to protect a nesting plover. We inspected both fence and supercilious plover. Then over there – slowly slowly – quietly! – we crept close to watch two vigilant wood duck parents and ten tiny ducklings.
28 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in Sydney snaps, Wildlife in the city
I have been thinking about immigration. About the immigration of by-the-wind sailors, violet snails and the blue stalked barnacle. They have all been landing on our shores, washed up on Newport Beach, and noted by a friend of mine. By-the-wind sailors (Velella velella), violet snails (Janthina janthina) and blue stalked barnacles (Lepas fascicularis) all live at the surface of the water (the sailors have a sail, set either to port or starboard[1]; the snails keep afloat by ‘secreting a raft of mucus bubbles’[2]; the barnacles manufacture a ‘foamy float’[3]), their fate determined by the wind. The fate of the blue stalked barnacle is also determined by the by-the-wind sailors, on which they feed.
While the wind is blowing snails and barnacles ashore at Newport, other immigrants are spreading through our suburbs. The koel and the channel-billed cuckoo arrived some weeks ago, the koel’s eerie early-morning cry[4] laying a sheen of dread over the backyards and street trees, the channel-billed cuckoo screeching with impunity[5]. They both fly south to Australia for the summer, from New Guinea and Indonesia, and fly back at the beginning of autumn. Their chicks, who have been raised by unhappy host birds, leave a little later but return here in spring.
I watch a pair of magpies attempt to chase an implacable channel-billed cuckoo away from their nest, the whole episode conducted with a clack of beaks and a great deal of flurrying of branches. The cuckoo might be trying to lay an egg, or to feed on the eggs or baby birds already in the nest. Either way, it infuriates me. The grey butcherbird, a bird that lives in Australia all the time, is also described as ‘an aggressive predator’[6] and will eat smaller birds as well. But its song is my favourite, and even when I see it sitting on the gutter of our building, essentially licking its lips while the noisy miners fuss around their depleted nest, I watch it adoringly and wait for it to sing[7].
Am I displaying a hard-wired antipathy towards migrants in my favouritism for the butcherbird? If so, why is my day so enriched by talking to the man at the fruit shop who tells me he was born in Cyprus and has lived here since he was seven, how he loves Australia but also goes back to visit family in Cyprus whenever he can. He’s going back for a wedding in January, when there will be snow on the ground. Or the man at the stall where I buy hummus and falafel and beetroot dip who tells me that he came out here from Syria 16 years ago. He didn’t speak English so although he didn’t want to just stay in one area he had to get jobs where he could speak Arabic. Now that he’s selling his dips, which was his profession in Syria, he’s learnt English and he can talk to everyone.
My life is enriched by a picnic yesterday with an Australian woman who is now making her life in France, with a French husband. It’s enriched by the thought that at the end of the year I will see my nephew – whose parents were Australian but who was born in Northern Ireland – marry a woman in a traditional ceremony in Hong Kong in her parents’ village. Their son, born in London, has great-grandparents born in Australia, China and France.
Our borders are porous, for people as well as for violet snails, blue stalked barnacles and koels. There’s no point pretending otherwise.
[1]http://www.underwatersydney.org/Creatures/Floaters/By-the-wind-sailors.aspx
[2]http://www.mesa.edu.au/AtoZ/Violet_Sea_Snail.asp
[3]http://www.lhimuseum.com/species/view/180
[4]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/sites/www.birdsinbackyards.net/files/factsheets/audio/eudynamys-scolopacea.mp3
[5]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/sites/www.birdsinbackyards.net/files/factsheets/audio/scythrops-novaehollandiae.mp3
[6]http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Cracticus-torquatus
14 Thursday Sep 2017
Posted in Wildlife in the city
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14/9/17
At the entrance to the community garden I empty my compost bucket into the bin. Today I am not in a rush, and I stop and look around. They’ve been making changes in the garden and it’s more open. It’s easier to see the new raised garden bed with its flowering marigolds and purple crinkly kale. I walk along its length towards the shed, with three beehives on its roof. The bees are moving busily around the entrances, taking to the sky and disappearing. A movement in the old bath full of duckweed and branches lets me see one bee carefully balanced on the thick surface, drinking.
I am drawn deeper into the garden, drawn by mulched garden beds and climbing pea sprouts. A bay tree and a coffee bush, covered in berries, guard each side of the path. I go through them to the garden lots, each tended for better or worse. They form a narrow strip of optimism, their baby lettuces in rows, their tomatoes staked.
As I stand in silence, consumed by the sight of green leaves and brown soil, I hear a rustling. I track it to the back of an area newly overturned and composted, to a noise that becomes a pecking, a shaking of leaves. A small black head, still showing traces of baby grey-brown, bobs up and down, its neatly hooked beak worrying at a nugget of clumped soil. It extracts something – worm, beetle, sliver of decomposed meat – looks at me with satisfaction and gulps it down. It digs again, successfully, hops to one side and digs from a new direction, tossing aside rotted leaves to expose the soil and its morsels. Abruptly it looks at me again and flies off.
The song of the butcherbird is one of my favourites. I like to think that my compost was feeding that one.
30 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Wildlife in the city
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A cone of streetlight fell onto an autumn tree in a winter night, shining its leaves and giving them colour. Clusters of rounded leaves – orange, yellow, red, light green – hung like lanterns papered in torn tissue by Matisse. They formed garlands that swung in the breeze, each piece in place, but when the traffic lights changed from red to green, and a torrent of cars swept up the oil-dark road, each leaf flew freely and the lanterns were flotsam, swept to and fro, and the tree shook off its garlands to become one mass, shaking, shivering.
