I watch as the swamphen walks his recently dried-out lake shoreline border. He is the most obvious bird that’s left. A black-blue purple, with red beak, hen sized, singing up the will-filled depths, tail flicking as he walks the shoreline with large splayed-toed unwebbed feet, the now-cracked bed littered with its prints. I watch him at the borders of the grass and faintest high-water line, still wet, most recent; the whole thing shrinking. It looks like his domain. A guardian of a kind of threshold. One of the few, maybe the only watery bird, who stays. 

But then in the clump of maleleucas, on which used to be a kind of island, I see a small flitting and a rushing, as one bird chases another, just a couple of shadows, then disappearing behind another clump. Then out they shoot again, and I see they’re crakes, probably spotted, but they’re so far away. Like a smaller version of the swaphen—a smaller version in and out of branches and shrubby trees. A smaller version of the bird who stays. And I’m reminded too of the buff-banded rail. All belly striped and buff/orange colourings, slightly bigger than the crake, but stopping short of the swaphen. Another shoreline bird who stays, but masked and masking within the reeds and rushes and the shade. The rail another kind of version of this archetypal shoreline birding. The moorhens and the coots step into the water more often than not, swimming; and leave with the water. Not the swamphen, and now I’m wondering maybe too the crake and rail. But what they each seem to announce is an archetypal shoreline lakeside bird. A bird that gives these three forms for this place, but given different places, different plants and lakes and waters, generally a different context, would produce different birds. Like the native black tailed hen. Like a million other other-place variations. 

Like Goethe’s archetypal plant with an infinite amount of potential manifestations, so too the lakeside threshold bird. The lakeside threshold hen.