Just when I was saying to my friend that there are really no birds left at the dry lake except the swamphen, the heron, a sandpiper, some dotterels, rails, and a few black winged stilts, in fly a couple of raptors. “Raptors?” he asks. “Birds of prey.” In addition to all these walkers on wet and dry mud, we still have a couple of birds looking over; a couple of birds flying: the first a medium sized, compact, orange one, maybe a kestrel, maybe a juvenile hobby. “I’m not so good with my raptors,” I say. And then, a moment later into full view: a black-shouldered kite. “As I was saying, not much here, except…”
Category Archives: Nature Poetry
Wayan and Kwirlam
The only birds I can immediately see at the lake today are wayan the white faced heron, grey and thinly gentleman-like in his stick-like wanderings; and kwirlam the purple swamphen all dark and round, ball-like, close to the ground. Kwirlam is one of the few, if not the only bird, who’ll stay within the lake’s area when it dries completely. Not quite there yet, wayan stays around the lake, walking the drier and sometimes wetter areas; this day he’s half-way between both, quietly sizing up the insects in front of him. And from the south comes one kwirlm, hoofing along at a trot, surely not going to run right into wayan. But yes, we (me and wayan) both seem to see this at the last minute. I expect wayan to back away, this not being fully his place, but he raises up his wings, extends his neck and uncoils as if to throw his beak at kwirlam, spear like, and adding to this a kind of high-guttural cry. Kwirlam is taken aback, pauses, retreats a step, and then walks around wayan. Was I the only one who noticed this epic standoff between the nervous, head-like heron, and the round, digestive hen?
The Wall is Breached!
The cliff wall formed along the beach last Tuesday morning has now been breached. It took not a storm from the west with the force of seas and swell to over-run it, but merely a bout of higher tides with peak south moon, and some usually strong afternoon sea breezes—and now the sand castle is breached. The once one-metre-high clifftop wall is now a 45 degree even ramp—a launching pad up to the crest and then general decline of the limestone sand behind it, followed by another rise to the dunes and first plants behind that. And with rain and clouds this morning we get the first taste of what will be coming, all too soon.
Water Stops Itself
I visited the beach this morning for the first time in what might have been weeks. And I was surprised to find a one-metre-high cliff wall along the water line. It stretched along the southern part of the beachy bay, then broke gradually up into bay-ridge type mounds in the middle of the bay, before gradually, generally, flattening out into the far distance. The wind this morning is a gentle south easterly; the water comes in generally from a south western angle. I think back over the past days and weeks—no high swells or seas—a storm on the weekend, but the wind came in from the east, offshore, rather than driving the waves higher up the beach. And so the water, on lower seas and swell and (mostly) wind and tides has made for itself, with the sand it pushes up, a kind of barrier to stop its own advancing higher. It has made a kind of new dune line closer to the ocean—about 50 metres closer than the current one.
And I can only assume it will stay this way, until a storm comes in from the south west bringing wind and seas and swell (or a sufficiently high afternoon tide with south west wind behind) to throw the water in waves up over whatever walls it has placed so far in its own path, and so advance further up the beach. And with a general rising of the world’s waters, and an increase in more extreme weather, the general shoreline will keep invading further inland, as much as the water itself seeks to stop its own advance—seeks to keep itself in place, seeks to maintain a healthy interaction with land—a central part of the ecosystem which it itself with many others has made.
Birin Birin Again
After not having seen birin birin the rainbow bee eater for my first forty-four years, I’ve suddenly seen them in three places in the space of three weeks. But isn’t that the way with things? First we might hear a story, and in so doing develop some kind of organ for potentially seeing, then one day we see something, and our rudimentary organ must then fit and adapt to what is being seen—we now have a more developed birin-birin sense organ—somethign to see the orange head and green chest and other rainbow colours of balanced triangular wings and longer beak ready to catch bees and other insects, forming themselves into somewhat swarming groups, not unlike the bees they seek, making a stange kind of cricket or cicada-type chirp. First at Kartagarrup Kings Park, then at a pool on Bilya Madjit the Murray River near Dwellingup, and then again today near Perry Lakes—all of it Bunaru second summer before, I’m told, they’ll head north once more. Birin birin organs forming. And one cannot help but wonder what other unformed organs lie in waiting—what other things are we not seeing, humanity?
Satellites
Sitting under clear-yet-treed nighttime camping skies we look up the long trunks of them to the blinking of the stars above. And right where Orion has done up his belt, right where the snout of nyingarn the echidna pokes into the black holes of space looking for ants, a friend spots a satellite passing through, north west to south east, then another a few seconds later on the same line, then another, then another—a dozen at least in relatively short succession, almost all of them following the same line; same way that the sun and moon and planets all more or less follow the same line, with the zodiac moving more slowly beyond them. Except, here, it is some other line altogether, so much faster, irregular—something man-made amongst nature’s rhythms—rhythms we at first helped fix, and now move and bend to our own will. Where is the lawful next?
There is Cooli!
In the last couple of weeks it’s been the same band of usual suspects as the lake inhales its last dirty puddles. Kwirlam the swamphen, the resident lake shoreline bird, here even when the lake is all but cracked earth and grass. Nolyang the dusky moorhen, smaller than kwirlam, still patrolling some of the shallow pools. The black-winged stilt in twos or fours, still stretching their pencil legs within the water. Wayan the whitefaced heron, larger, patrolling, lurking the expanding plains of the dryer mud between drying pool and encroaching grass. And old sharp-tail aka woody the sandpiper walking small around the edges or the centre here and there, his tail bobbing as he goes, like a little tuft of mud up and given form. But today, an old familiar friend re-appeared—one I’d wondered at whether or not he’d left when the lake began to dry; a smaller type of hen, really, larger than a crake (who I also haven’t seen for days, weeks)—cooli, the buff-banded rail; orange headed and chested with stripy lines to boot, a kind of turtle-shell-coloured brown on his back, slinking through the grasses by the winter lake’s edge, now dry. Cooli who I’d missed. Cooli who’s stayed. (Almost three years since the lake has fully dried.)
Just When You Thought it Was a Sharp-Tailed Sandpiper
How often it seems you’re given a name for something you’ve been seeing regularly—”It’s a sharp-tailed sandpiper,” matching at once the name to the thing in front of you, wedded, known—when you go away for a couple of weeks and return, and think you’ve seen the same old friend as before, small of course, engaging the kind of naked-eye birdwatching that you do. “Old sharp-tail is back,” you proclaim, full of wisdom, to no-one but yourself, and this writing. Only to read in a monthly newsletter today that it is, in fact, a “wood sandpiper” (the article by the same guy who pointed out the initial sharp tail). I can see it in my mind’s eye now, its bobbing tail and short, sharp movements, its almost brown-grey feathers against the greyness of the drying lake. “Old woody is back!” I proclaim, and none could care less, except maybe woody (possibly sharp-tailed), and of course me, for my whole world has yet again changed.
While Looking for Birin Birin
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.
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.
John Stubley 