Two in the Bush

Over an early morning coffee in Hanoi, my attention was drawn to the chirping of birds. I listened carefully – I’d already mistaken a scooter’s screeching brakes for some avian call – but I was soon convinced that the whistling was coming from the syrinx of some songbird. Not knowing the common species there, it was hard to tell to whom I might be listening. But I had done some research and hoped that perhaps I was hearing a red-whiskered bulbul or tailorbird, or perhaps even the local equivalents of the silvereye or fantail.

One of the most glaring deficiencies of most cities is the lack of anything apart from human life. Used to the ecosystems of the Tasmanian bush – on any given day in my usual habitat, a eucalyptus forest on the outskirts of a rural village, the ratio might be one human to a thousand birds – I feel almost disturbed by the lack of other animals.

In Hanoi, unfortunately, it turned out that the birds I could hear were in cages hanging across the road from the little hole in the wall at which I sipped my sweet morning coffee. I still don’t know what species they were; I didn’t look too closely to them, to be honest. For me, there’s little joy or fascination in seeing birds in cages.

Later that day, I had a different encounter. I was walking around Hồ Tây, the West Lake, when I saw the silhouettes of birds on the wing. They were occupying a few green islands out on the water, but their main haunt had a thicket of ficus trees that sprawled out over the lake. I walked over there and found that it was the site of a temple, which is why the habitat of mature figs had been protected. It made it a kind of Buddhist bird-hide.

For an hour I sat in the shadow of the verdant leaves as bitterns and kingfisher squawked and squabbled, soaring into the lake to take an occasional fish. It was a euphoric and unforgettable moment; I promptly began to put it in poetry.

When I was my kid, my cousins had an aviary. In these were kept a coterie of colourful birds, budgerigars, which have adorable faces and feathers of very colour. They are traded around the world as a domesticated pet and I can see how they children everywhere might be fond of budgies. But I don’t remember being much entertained by them.

The birds that really grabbed our attention were the plovers, or, to give them a more specific common name (plovers are found all round the world), the masked lapwing. They occupied the paddocks behind my cousins’ house and we would run through their fields. The thoroughly territorial plovers arked up at our approach, their alarm call – ethereal and shrill – echoed out towards the rim of mountains that surrounded our rural home range.

A masked lapwing is an intense bird. Their face-covering is as yellow as a lump of sulphur; under each wings they have a sharp spur. They are simply stressed parents: their eggs are laid on the ground, highly exposed, so it’s a fraught existence. It isn’t only humans that piss them off – you will sometimes see one or several plovers chasing after ravens, cockatoos or large raptors, which sometimes raid their vulnerable nests.

Our game was to run out across the grass – vaguely aware that the plovers’ eggs were out there somewhere - and provoke the birds to swoop. We lugged eucalyptus limbs out with us because we believed that if you dived to the ground and raised a stick, the plovers would have to turn away at the last moment and couldn’t strike you with its spur.

We would pretend that we didn’t want to be swooped, but if we preferred a peaceful afternoon we would have stayed far away from the paddocks. It may have been that we liked the rush of meeting a wild animal. It was an exhilarating test. In the masked lapwing, us kids had met our match.

I would not intentionally go out and annoy birds these days, but I must say, our juvenile activities in the paddocks had one unintended side-effect. We learned to respect the ferocity of plovers. In comparison, the caged budgies had no will, no force of life about them whatsoever.

A good mate of mine used to be frightened of birds. It’s strange to think of because he’s now a very keen and experienced bushwalker, but I remember scrub-bashing across the top of a mountain when a wedge-tailed eagle hovered directly above us. We must have accidentally strayed near to its eyrie and roused the eagle into a defensive position. It was low enough above us that if we’d leapt up with an arm outstretched, we could almost have touched its belly. My mate lost his nerve.

I have been fortunate enough to have several close encounters with large raptors. Once, I climbed up a scrubby escarpment and found myself face-to-face with a wedgie. It had perched on a rock and, even as I emerged suddenly from the vegetation, it didn’t budge. It was my first close look at a wedge-tailed eagle. I noted its severe face – its angry eyes - and its beak, which looked like a knife held poised, ready to strike. Its bare talons were also weapons: I was nearly surprised that as they moved across the dolerite, sparks didn’t fly from the friction.

Some years ago in Tbilisi, I was approached by a man who carried a golden eagle on his arm. The eagle was on a leash; its legs were tied too and it had blinkers on. The man came up to me silently and transferred the eagle onto my forearm. It was a gimmick; I was supposed to want a photo with the captive raptor and pay a few lari for the privilege.

I shook my head and gestured for the man to take the bird back. But I remember that for those few seconds, I was intently aware of how powerful the eagle’s talons were. I sometimes fancy that I can still feel the claws pressing into my flesh.

At home, I leave the doors of the train carriage throughout the day. Once in a while I’ll be reading when a bird suddenly ducks into my living space, sometimes with such sudden, erratic motions that I am forced to duck or crouch low to the floor in order to avoid copping a bird to the face. I am especially thinking of the grey fantails who do not know how to fly in a straight line, but somersault theatrically – a movement that is not appropriate for the confined spaces of my shack, with its precarious book stacks.

But it is not only fantails. Thornbills are also an occasional visitor and it is harder to persuade them to leave. They find odd perches and although they are slightly panicked, they aren’t convinced by my advice to head for the open door.

Grey shrike-thrushes have also come into the carriage – gregarious, medium-sized birds that whistle loudly and without self-consciousness. There is a risk, I have thought as I’ve watched them perform their music from the top of a shelf, that they will wreak some havoc. I am waiting for the day that an even bigger and more rambunctious bird chooses to drop in: a raven, a native hen, a peregrine falcon.

Last year I stayed on a houseboat in East Gippsland for several weeks. It was also a beautiful spot, surrounded by bird habitat, and it was pleasant to throw the doors open and enjoy the music of countless species. Welcome swallows had set up several nests on the façade of the vessel; they moved with such speed and bravado that it was inevitable that one would stray indoors eventually.

I was cooking a curry; the swallow flew up to a wire rail upon which a curtain ran. It shuffled slightly,.then dropped a spot of shit onto the floor. I put a lid on the pot, turned off the heat, and began to try to convince it that it wasn’t so welcome after all.

So began a comedic routine. I flailed my arms around and waved at the swallow with a tea towel. It simply hopped between several perches, shitting wherever it pause. Finally, I cornered the bird against a window and grabbed it, using my jacket as a catcher’s mitt. Squeaking worriedly, in a state of distress, it had bounced off the glass several times before it acquiesced to my grasp: the swallow stopped wriggling – the arrangement of fine, thin bones fell still – and the small beak, usually so full of noise, became silent. The swallow had surrendered to its destiny.

The bird made no pleas; it didn’t even look at me, though ordinarily, a welcome swallow will peer about persistently, twisting its neck so its face is tilted towards the possibilities of danger, or else to seek out that which meets its appetite. I looked at it tenderly, as if this was an intimate moment. Then walked over to the door and flung it out into the open, where it met with its fellow swallows, cavorting in the air, spinning, touring the banks and fallen tree trunks, taking insects as it turned pirouettes and bringing them back to the nest.

Not long ago I read novel The Birds Also Have Gone by the exceptional Turkish author Yaşar Kemal. It is about a group of boys who snare birds on the plains at the outskirts of Istanbul; they bring the birds into the city and offer for them sale outside mosques, churches and synagogues. Their customers pay to open the doors of the cages and release the birds. “Fly and be free,” they say, and ask the birds to go to paradise in advance of them, giving a record of the good deed that they have done in liberating them.

It reminded me of a morning in a city far away. In the hotel lobby, a budgerigar chirped and whistled from behind bars. I was travelling with a woman who had lived in the Australian outback; she had seen the huge flocks of budgies that appear in the desert after rain, like wildflowers blooming around the waterholes.

She looked with a downcast face at the sight of this minute parrot put into solitary confinement. I had heard much of this woman’s life story and I realised that the metaphor of the caged budgie was, for her, personal.

She was leaving. We said farewell at the door of that faraway hotel. I sat for a while next to the budgie in its cage and began to make peace with the fact that I might never seen that woman again. Fly and be free, I might have said, thinking of the tiny songbirds, costumed in feathers of red and yellow and blue – tits and warblers and buntings, wagtails and finches and flycatchers that for millennia have migrated across the thistle-fields of Eurasia. (Though in fairness, I must forewarn you that The Birds Also Have Gone does not end happily.)

The proverbs says that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. This is not the case by my calculations. What is it about seeing these feathered creatures rise, soar, swoop, hover or dive that makes the heart so content? As far as I’m concerned, let them all flit away from me, forever slipping from my grasp.

But please, never out of sight, and not beyond the reach of my life. Yet the thistle-strewn fields in which the boys on Istanbul’s outskirts once gathered birds for the sake of the game they called ‘fly and be free’ have long since been paved over. So too the paddocks in which I once goaded the yellow-masked plovers. We clear, cut, mow and cover with concrete that which once was the home habitat of birds.

“Maybe the birds, impelled by some ancient, deep-rooted instinct, will come again to the sky over where that lofty plane tree is now but which will have been cut down by then,” wrote Yaşar Kemal, presciently, in his novel. “They will pause a moment, searching for something, vaguely remembering. They will flutter in little groups over the concrete agglomeration of houses, and finding nowhere to alight will take themselves off like some remote sorrow.”