The last couple of nights along the river I have walked right under the downward gaze and flapping of a raptor. Two nights ago, the large osprey flew right above me, all white bellied and brown eyebrowed, feathers somewhat askew, heading downriver, but destined to turn back again to its nest upstream. He looked down through me to the shoreline beside us, then disappeared behind a tree by the jetties; I didn’t see him reappear, and couldn’t find him when I looked. He may well be the same one who sits sometimes on the first lights above the bridge, or who grabs fish by the boat ramp on the otherside, flying low to the water in the centre of the river inland with its catch in its feet.

Last night we walked more upriver, and at a little lookout the slightly smaller form of a black shouldered kite came into view, more manicured than the haggled looking osprey, black underwing tips, black eye, hovering right above us, beak to the southwesterly, looking past us to the shoreline below, showing his black shoulders when he shifted further upriver, then gliding off inland—maybe the same who sits on the lights above the trainline by the beach some days, or further up the coast, hovering.

All the time these birds seemingly appearing from and disappearing back into the heights of the sky above, coming from it, made from it, not daring even, it seems, to touch the ground but only to take from it, or from the water in the form of fish, something that it can speedily take back to its skyhouse and nest—a thief from the skies above, plundering what the earth gives up from below, gives up from the depths.