{A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds in hand.}
As Louise packs into a handmade timber crate her unique state artists' book A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds and an edition of A Flight of Southern Hemisphere Birds for their winged journey by way of art courier to the State Library of New South Wales, I am taking the chance to share with you the last of the explorer's narrative I wrote to accompany the work. You can read all the imagined field notes here in one fell swoop.
AUGUST Red Knot (Calidris canutus)
THURSDAY 8th
Near to 11 AM
As
we pass the halfway point of the year, if I thought for but a moment
that my to-ing and fro-ing in search of particular birds was of immense
proportions, a cursory glance at the annual flight patterns of the Red
Knot soon returned my head to right proportion. Now at the south east
Gulf of Carpentaria, I await their arrival. Made up of many subspecies
(the nominate subspecies Calidris canutus breeds in the Taymyr Peninsula and in central- north Siberia, for example, whilst the subspecies C. rogersi breeds in north-east Siberia; the subspecies C. roselaari breeds at Wrangel Island, Siberia, and north-west Alaska; subspecies rufa breeds in the Canadian Arctic; and subspecies C. islandica breeds
on the islands of the Canadian high Arctic and northern Greenland. Have
I lost you yet, dear reader, to the factual whirl of the fan?) Beholden
to the mudflats, sandflats, estuaries, bays and inlets, lagoon and
harbours, to sight a Red Knot I know where to look. I know too of the
food they fancy, and so as I wait, I prepare gastropods, crustaceans and
echinoderms. Worms, and bivalves too. And with too much time on my
hands, I have arranged my gastropods and worms so as to spell out the
word ‘Welcome’ on the sandy beach. Fearing they may mock my sign or deem
it too much, I flip my prearranged crustaceans over and reshuffle my
bivalves until the arrangement now loosely resembles the words 'Eco' and
'Mewl'. Though upon reflection, perhaps now this merely renders me
foolish. Of all those in the animal kingdom, surely it is humans who are
by far the most ridiculous. I wait for the Red Knots like a nervous
host unsure anyone will come, the mangled words of Nietzsche in my ear:
"I fear the animals regard man as a being like themselves, seriously
endangered by the loss of sound animal understanding; they regard him
perhaps as the absurd animal, the laughing animal, the crying animal,
the unfortunate animal."
SEPTEMBER
Superb Fruit-Dove
(Ptilinopus superbus)
SATURDAY 14th
Not long after breakfast 7.10 AM
In the loose vine tangles of the Atherton Tablelands of Tropical North Queensland (the
pungency of the air here!), I sight the plump-ly welcoming appearance of the superbly
coloured Superb Fruit-Dove, that most brilliant of seed dispensers. With its purple crown,
and burnt marmalade hindneck, this tree-dwelling male marvel is as brilliantly coloured
as the plants it favours. Blackberries, lilly-pillies, pittosporums, and figs for this Super
Bus/superbus of a bird with its wide gape. I believe it was in my handbook of Southern
Hemisphere birds, Volume three, Snipe to Pigeons, that I first came across the to my
mind charming fact that all of the Fruit-Doves (the larger Wompoos and the smaller
species the Rose-Crowned and the Superb) prefer black-purple fruits. Using ultraviolet
colour cues to assess ripeness and suitability, I was struck by the visual this painted in my
mind’s eye. The two smaller species will also sip dew from leaves that serve as Mother
Nature's crockery. High up in the canopy, the Fruit-Dove seemed upon reading, and
sitting here now still does to some extent, to present like a fairytale superbly coloured.
OCTOBER Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus)
SATURDAY 19th
4.20 PM
Spring
in Uruguay proving warmer than I’d anticipated, but ten months into my
project I find I care little of my discomforts. My search for October’s
desired bird to immortalize proved simple enough to find owing to their
distinctive oven-like nests clearly visible in trees, and atop telephone
and electricity poles. Fashioned from mud and manure, these nests look
just like the ovens that we humans have named the inhabitants after.
(‘Hornero’ is Spanish for ‘Baker’, my pocket-sized phrase book informs.)
But perhaps what proved of greatest surprise was the interior of one of
these nests, which are far roomier on the inside than you’d expect
judging from the outside. A Tardis! Inside, the nest consists of two
chambers, one serving as the actual nest and the other as a decoy in
order to bamboozle their natural predators, and I am immediately struck
by the ingenious nature of this plan. Knowing this it is perhaps easier
to see now why a handful of folklores about unfaithful females (to be
penned in the second chamber), and Catholicism (the birds are never seen
to work on a Sunday) have sprung up about this bird. As I draw the
Rufous Hornero and her nest I think of all the legends, poems, beliefs,
folk and fairytales that in some way reference a bird. Death comes as a
rooster to the Cubans (according to traditional folklore); an eagle, an
omen of victory in the Chorus from Agamemnon; a peacock’s feather in
your house, unlucky you’ll be; and wheeling gulls overhead are the souls
made manifest of sailors drowned. Nesting in sagas, parables,
paintings, and roosting in song, the bird appears as a symbol awaiting
human reading as many times as it does, I like to think, for its own
clever and beautiful sake.
NOVEMBER Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata)
SUNDAY 10th
9 AM or thereabouts
Those
small crowned seabirds of Macquarie Island in the Antarctic, foraging
for food amidst the kelp and making rocky gravel nests hold me
fascinated at the 11-month point. I move slow and soundlessly, mimicking
the studied movements of my cat at home fortress minding. I move up
close to their breeding site, but I am no predator, no foe to the Sterna vittata.
I, unlike my feline with her sharp claws and cunning, borrow patience
only. I also come equipped with wide-eyed hope tied to bottomless
admiration, and a handful of pencils near-warn-down-to-stub and
(windblown) paper. I am here to draw a portrait only, and I’ll not
disturb William Blake and the heavens either ("A Robin Redbreast in a
cage; Sets all Heaven in a rage"). I regret that this project of mine
will soon draw to a close, but like the red bills* of the Tern, it’s not faded yet.
* In the breeding season, the bills of the Tern are a bright red which later fade to a dark red in the non-breeding season.
DECEMBER Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia)
TUESDAY 17th
A little after MIDDAY
Creeping
on all fours in the Banhine National Park, southern Mozambique
grasslands, a concerto by Pergolesi about my ears, as I watch the birds
about me feed. I’ve timed my journey to tie in with the breeding period
of this curious performing passerine. The male is easy to spot with a
tail twice his body length and grown for breeding season alone. And it
is with their tails that they perform ‘competitive songflights’ in order
to woo, after which the tails are shed. As I await the males to take to
their theatre stage, and my yearlong search to find, meet, and capture
(though drawing) draws to its natural close, I am struck by one thought
and one thought alone. Though there is little similar in my makeup to
the Shaft-tailed Whydah, though I’ve a beak where he a nose—or do I mean
that they other way around?—we are not so very different in the things
that make us tick. Feathers and flight out of the equation, are not the
homes we build, the lives we lead, the desires we hold, the performances
we mount, the foods we need, the patterns we form, the knowledge we
hold, and our means to survive: are not we all more similar than not?
The midday sun might make a scramble of my brain, but of this one
thought I am unwaveringly sure. We are all animals, some of us more
magnificent than others. And as such, we all deserve to live as we
choose. This long exploration has seen me fly (with borrowed wings,
granted), and it has been both an unfathomable puzzle and utterly
edifying. Scrawled in the margin: challenging, creative, rough,
inspired, illuminating. I’ve darted from place to place in twelve-month
span to the sounds of chord tinkling bird call. I’ve made myself a study
of wanderlust unrestrained! A dream of flying near a reality! But if
you were to tell me that I’d actually been exploring inside my head,
eyes closed, journeying on imagination’s wave crest or even ambling
about inside a Cornell box work then, perhaps I was. I’ll
let you be map keeper and fact checker if you’ll just tuck under your
wing this truth: we are not so very different as we like to think we
are.
Familiar? The title of this post borrows from Shakespeare's Macbeth.
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?—O hell-kite!—All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
And the above photos were taken on the morning we took down our work at Geelong Gallery as part of All breathing in heaven. In my hands, a copy of Louise's A flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, and behind me, Figure of Ruth, seated on a rock, 1890, marble, by Charles F Summers.)
