While looking for birin birin the rainbow bee-eater in kartagarrup Kings Park—at first between burned-out and non-burned section of bushland, then moving into all unburned area—seeing there by the way birin birin in numbers, their green chests and mostly-orange heads with dark eye line, flittering in medium size and triangular wings powerfully through the canopy, pausing on branches, longer honey-eater type beaks, making a sound like cicadas—I come across three very large karak red-tailed black cockatoos on a female kwell sheoak branch. One karak with almost fluorescent yellow-green dots walking slowly, languidly up a branch, effortlessly snapping with its beak single thin sticks that lie in its slow upward march towards the nuts at the end of the branch, arriving there to snap again with beak and grab with claw the nutted and straight-leaved edge of the tree, holding firm with foot while picking at the seeds, its large beak like one giant incisor from top and another from bottom, coming together in a point to crush the little seeds within the nut. I try to feel what it would be like if all my teeth were condensed into one giant incisor, going beyond the two front teeth of the mouse into a full front-of-headedness, full top-of-headedness. The bird belongs to this part of us. Belongs to the part of the world coming down from the peripheries to land for a moment upon the earth. This nerve-sensed-ness. And the tree—in this case the kwell—rooted to the earth, with its slow and gradual growing up and outness, in stem and branches, contractions into flowerings, which for the kwell happens for nearby male plants, followed in the female by fruitful nut expansion with seed within. The nut of the kwell a final expanding outwards that seeks also for a kind of longing for something coming from the wide skies above—not just a contraction into seed, but a longing for another kind of meeting. And this day the meeting comes from karak the red-tailed black cockatoo—from the wider periphery reaching down, and finding the seed within the outward edges of the sheoak—eating, scattering—something touched by the heights, by light, by thinking from above, then deposited back to earth now in fallen bits from mouths, or later in what is excreted. Marri trees; other trees the same. Heaven and the earth in exchange. Our thinking watches on, observing a scene metabolised in us through that which stands firmly on the earth.
Author Archives: jbstubley
Walking the River Again
While walking the river two days ago I saw by the jetty a small, then larger, school of kwulla the mullet—the first school slow moving amongst the blowfish, then the other shooting quickly by, their side scales flashing, their light tinge of blue fins swishing. All this while an osprey is chased towards the cliffs by two seagulls a hundred metres upriver—the second time in a number of days I’ve watched him be pursued. The mullet come back now, swimming upriver this time towards the osprey. Midi the large pied cormorant pops up from out of the water, surely in pursuit of something too big—some of the mullet pushing 40cm, not much smaller than him (though I do recall a cormorant pulling up a massive flathead some months ago). The mullet turn again and push downriver. I walk the same direction, and in front of the hotel a hundred or so metres south I see a couple of other mullet, smaller, resembling bream, swimming in the shallows, untroubled—and this time kakak the small pie cormorant comes up, then washes himself, before taking off, wings and feet like the pelican, though shorter, smoother. Two Pacific black ducks swim nearby, right above the mullet, almost touching them, and neither species seems to mind. I move on. And on my way back, the mullet are mostly gone, and one of the ducks is washing himself like the cormorant was, before both ducks jump up onto a boat pen just above the water’s surface, and begin their feather cleaning.
Seen it All
Just when I thought I’d seen it all. No stilts today at the lake, no whitefaced heron spotted or sandpipers seen, everything now gone as the last small pools dry, leaving only the swamphen and moorhen and the wind in the weeds and grasses, passing by. So I pick up my feet and walk the southern end towards the figs that, because of shothole borers and chainsaw remedies, are likely marked to die. And there at the southernmost tip of the remaining watery bits I spy the slow movements of the whitefaced heron, his grey feathers almost as dark as the drying and cracking of the lake. It’s more his shifting face that gives him away, right at the water’s edge, large and moving, finding another spot to again pause and wait. Okay, I think, wayan the heron is still here, but the sandpipers have followed the dotterels and swans and ducks and every other water bird and wader and moved on. But then I spot the tiny moving tail and needle like beak of the sandpiper, its white belly clearly moving in the shallows, its grey back completely dissolving into the greyness of the drying lake. Okay, one heron and one sandpiper, and that is all, time to go. Though just before leaving the jetty where I stand, I follow the heron all the way to the closest pool and notice nearby, right there, just at hand, though larger because closer, another sandpiper clearly moving at the edge of the constantly contracting shoreline. I look back over towards its mate—I’ve lost it again—but then see a line of white belly moving, before it turns, and there is left only a kind of sliding, slow relocation of grey on grey.
Seasonal Creep
It seems so often these days we find seasons creeping in, both ways. Like the hotter times of a month ago reappearing, lasting longer. Or the cooler times of some months ahead, arriving already, premature. The hotter summer days of birak in the time of bunaru. The cooler change and rain of Djeran, also Bunaru.
Into Hiking
I am not so interested in ‘thru’ hiking, or it’s relative polarity of ‘section’ hiking. I feel like thru hiking’s contrast is not in hiking some smaller section at probably the same pace or attention, but rather a polarity of this very activity of passing through something that stands as a kind of mere background to our own activity. I seek instead the polarity of ‘into’ hiking—not passing through something, inattentive, but rather passing into something, wideawake—in this case nature. (And finding there, eventually, one’s-self, mirrored back. But I seek not to experience myself directly. It is nature I seek to find.)
Thru Hiking
The temptation for ‘thru’ hiking
must surely come
when one grows sufficiently
uninterested
in the
‘turning round’.
Boodalung the Pelican Takeoff
It took me walking all the way to Green Place today to see a boodalung swim up closer, then look over. I stood on the jetty and took off my glasses so we could see each other eye to eye. I sang to him a little. And then he opened slowly up his wings, and propelled himself forward, his wings moving out and his feet kicking underneath the water. One flap, one foot scoop with both feet together, tugging at the water, then another flap, another double-footed scoop, then another and another, growing lighter, growing faster, and he was up, up, boodalung the pelican up—just above the water, flapping, then a pause and a glyde, going even lower, his belly almost touching the water, then more flaps, and more gliding and gone between the boats towards other shorelines.
Such will unfolding.
Another Day at the Lake
End of February, end of the water at the lake this season. Still enough of a pool, enough of a puddle to keep some birds here. Stilts stand in the water, their long legs sticking out. A sharp tailed sandpiper on the water’s edge, maybe two, or else a noodalyarong the black-fronted dotterel. I thought wayan the white-faced heron might have moved on, but no, there he is on the other side back a bit, on the drier ground, stalking. And then the morrhens on the even-drier ground, not too far from the rushes and reeds. Finally the swamphens mostly in a drier area to the north, amongst the green grasses, or moving in and out of the long rushes. Five karak black cockatoos fly directly overhead while giving glimpses of their fiery red tails. Two nyimarak shelducks circle above the lake a few times, but finding it not to their liking or depth, move on. At one point the swamphens and moorhens all move toward the cover of the rushes, their tales up. I look above, but can see no raptor, though he may be behind the trees.
The birds, then, move from the sharpest and most sticklike, most nervous and headlike, in the middle of the lake, to birds more rounded at its edges. All of them together giving the picture of a human being with their head planted in the last of the water, with body and belly and feet moving out, maybe even up.
The Almost Glossed-Over Ibis
Perry Lakes this morning where they’re now channeling water in from nearby lake, and the levels are still high. Koorodoor the egret, ngoonan the teals, coots, a white ibis, and then what at first seems like a straw-necked ibis. All of these I’ve seen before and known. But something keeps me locked onto the darker coloured ibis—a bird so often overlooked, given a derogatory name here in Australia by colonisers. In Egypt though—Thoth—the god of knowledge, writing, wisdom and scribes. What we value reflected in thinking and language. Everything contains something worthwhile. I stay with the ibis. it moves a little, and I get a better look, then another. And something I might have initially glossed over grows clearer. The first glossy ibis I can recall seeing. And I wonder how much else I might have missed.
Fire Area Kartagarrup
I went today to the recently burned area of Kartagarrup King’s Park and walked along the paths between the burned and unburned land. Some trees were lost—I spotted a banksia. But many were coming back—sheoaks shooting new, stick-like leaves, banksias bearding all along the stem and branches, marri’s flowering white, oblivious, xanthorea and wisteria coming back from the ground below. The understory groundcover so much clearer than the bushy and leaf-covered otherside of the path. And then, next to a marri, a red-flowering gum—distinct at this time of year amongst so many trees flowering white and yellow, like the marri, the paperbark, the ilyarrie, the tuart, even tea trees here or there. But here the red flowering gum stood, seemingly unaffected by the red of the fire that had just been—that would also have been somewhat orangelike, like the fruiting flesh on the Zamia seeds seen earlier this morning in Bold Park. The red of the tree’s small flowers falling also to the blackened ash of the ground, which still smelled like burnt earth—the dropped flowers a new red on the land, similar to the tail of karak the red cockatoo that now flies over, or the ones a moment ago seen on a nearby pine post, large headed and black as coal, with a tail of fire-orange to red, alive and burning. And then, above, moving amongst the flowers of the red-flowering gum, both on the burned side of the bush and the other, a group of birin birin rainbow bee eaters doing exactly that, beaks full, alighting on dead branches high up, from time to time, to eat or sometimes bash their bee-food, before swallowing. This smaller bird is all rainbow colourful and long beaked, the first ones I think I’ve ever seen, shooting through the trees with seemingly symmetrical triangular like wings, though not as quick as the white, yellow, black flash of bandiny the New Holland honeyeater. The bee-eaters sing together, and remind me of cicadas or crickets chirping, and the whole country sounds alive. And then, finally, into the scene lands noolarga the black-faced cuckoo shrike, all white-grey, except for his sooty visage, here to deliver something. I sing a little. He moves away. Then comes back. A messenger, or so I’ve been told.
John Stubley 