From curlews to bin chickens, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard our feathered friends
They live among us but many people never notice them. They watch us but often people are oblivious. They have adapted to our city and exist alongside us while we take them for granted. I’m talking about birds.
I’m a bit of a bird lover although I know some people don’t like them at all. I have a niece who has a phobia regarding birds. Anyone who has watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds too many times may feel the same.
But I love them. On a recent holiday to Hayman Island, we were sitting in one of the restaurants there when a Curlew wandered in. It’s a regular there apparently and that made my night.
Curlews are enigmatic birds. We have several varieties. I grew to love them on our many holidays to Townsville, my wife’s hometown.
At night the balmy evenings there are punctuated by the cries of Curlews. It’s a plaintive, even haunting cry. I used to love reading late at night with the breeze coming in off the ocean listening to the Curlews calling.
There’s a wonderful book entitled Curlews on Vulture Street by Darryl Jones which celebrates the birds who share our urban and suburban environment with.
It features a noble Curlew on the cover and Jones talks about the various species we are likely to see on any given day including the Ibis, a much-maligned bird nowadays. He celebrates these “bin chickens”.
It’s only in the last decade or two that we have come to regard them as pests but they are more native than we are. We have mucked up their more rural environments which is why they have taken to our cities.
Decades ago, when I was starting out in the business in Rockhampton, I regarded them as quite a romantic bird and I even wrote a poem about watching a flock of them winging their way west. It was published in the paper I worked for, The Morning Bulletin.
I can’t imagine too many people writing poems about them now! Although maybe I will write another and call it Ode to a Bin Chicken.
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There are so many birds around us each day. On our afternoon walks we come across curious magpies, butcher birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos, occasionally spangled drongos, mynahs both native and introduced, blue-faced honeyeaters and others.
Recently we had a visiting kookaburra which came and sat on the railing of our back deck demanding our attention and a snack.
We gave him a bit of raw chicken and he bashed it against the railing to soften it up before eating it. Then hearing his mate laughing uproariously from a tree nearby he flew off and we haven’t seen him since but I hope he returns.
I developed my love of our native bird life when we moved back to Australia from Hong Kong. We lived in what was then the countryside beyond Broadbeach on the Gold Coast and I became a bit of a bird watcher armed with a copy of the classic book What Bird is That? By Neville. W Cayley.
Maybe you have an old copy of that in your bookcase?
