Talking to the Birds

After almost two months in Adelaide, one of the things I realized I really miss about Australia is the wildlife. From our living room window in Manila I occasionally see a  team of four racing pigeons, looping round and round the apartment building opposite.  At street level, there is not even a sparrow with whom to pass the time of day. Forays into the country often find me waving to a carabou, neck deep in water, but that is the extent of it. And at the beach, we occasionally whoop over those stolid, studded starfish. They are hardly chatty. In Sydney, living on the edge of a national park, we conversed daily with a range of sociable, garulous parrots. The memory inspired the following piece…

There is a colour that is neither blue nor purple: indigo-violet-lilac-lavender? It is the colour of bluebells that spread like wildfire through English woodland in April. It is the colour of jacaranda flowers, small, five-lobed flowers like tiny trumpets heralding in the antipodean Spring. It is the colour of nostalgia and memory.

I stand high above this concrete city with a cup of coffee and reminisce about a place north of Sydney harbour, the bridge and the iconic Opera House, a home-among-the-gum-trees, where I sat one still November morning, sipping my coffee on our broad balcony, conversing with the loquacious lorikeets, who bitch and bicker over birdseed. My eyes wander down over the manicured lawn past a dispirited magnolia tree, ravaged by delinquent possums, to the wire fence at the bottom of our property, the boundary between smugly groomed garden and harum scarum, devil-may-care bushland. There, at the fence line, our  jacaranda stands guard, back to the encroaching bush, branches spread out protectively. Outlined against a thundery, leaden sky, it smudges the clouds with a hazy halo of purple like a fresh water-colour.

On a low branch squats a kookaburra, moody and motionless,  until suddenly he throws back his head withhis mocking, gunfire laugh that echoes through the trees.

As if in response, the sulphur-crested cockatoos sweep in. Strangely shy, despite their superior size, they kow-tow awkwardly to the bullying antics of the eastern lorikeets, who flaunt their beautiful, bright feathers with unmelodic, ear-piercing shrieks. Refusing to share their feeding trough, they strut and stamp, argumentative, aggressive, amusingly determined to have their own way. Meanwhile, the meek cockatoos, with wingspans that would knock their tormentors into tomorrow if they chose to retaliate, wait their turn patiently on the side-lines.

I love this airy space on the very rim of suburbia, the drop-off from urbane north shore homes to raw, untrammelled national park. Clear air, expansive skies, nature dressed in every shade of green from deeply glossy sub-tropical shrubbery to the dry, flaky, khaki eucalyptus, a flummery of wildlife ignoring human boundaries and taking their freedom for granted. This world is soothing and challenging at the same time, and it makes my heart clench with joy and gratitude that, if only for a moment I got to share this secret garden, a temporary haven in a transient life. As I run my finger around the edge of my coffee mug, the scent of lemon myrtle wafts up through the still air, I take a deep, deep breath, and smile.