Sunday, January 17, 2010

INTRO TO BIRD THIEF

By popular request – well four readers anyway – insist that I add the following memoir to my blog. This I am happy to do because I consider this work one of my best and most sincerely accomplished. I wrote it in 2004 and offered it to two literary journals but both weren’t interested. Both had, I might add, academic backgrounds and what would an academic editor know about honest to god story telling. Then I sent it off to Ralf Wessman at Famous Reporter, Ralf being in my mind one of the few editors who is attuned to what readers like, published it immediately. His common touch, reminds me of that wonderful editor Bruce Pascoe who edited Australian Short Stories through the nineteen eighties and nineties. Sadly now defunct. And I should like to add here with thumb firmly on end of nose and fingers extended like a cock’s comb that I have correspondence in my files from Amanda Lohrey and Nicholas Shakespeare who also thought it a humdinger

Intro

 EGG THIEF

What I know about birds I mostly gained from my father as we tramped the hills and gullies of Tasmania. An ardent Field Naturalist member and a keen amateur ornithologist he said that birds were put on this earth to amaze us with their beauty and their song. I was thirteen years old; he was fifty-five. At that age I wasn’t much interested in bird watching myself. Birds were birds as far as I was concerned. Some were big and some were small, some whistled and some squawked, and some - if you were unlucky - shat on you from a great height. No, I wasn’t there by choice, I accompanied my father on those jaunts for quite a specific purpose; I was his guardian - commissioned by my mother to make sure that he didn’t forget where, or even who, he was.

My father was a TPI war pensioner. He was shot through the neck during a bayonet charge in the final weeks of World War One. He lay on the battlefield all day and through the night, conscious but completely paralyzed. The following day the medics loaded him on to the truck with the rest of the dead. It was only through the alertness of one of the soldiers at the burial site that he was saved from the horrendous ordeal of being buried alive. The soldier felt that the body he lifted down from the truck still had warmth. He held a mirror to my father’s mouth and the trace of steam on the glass showed that he was still breathing.

It took four years for him to recover from his ordeal. According to my mother, a voluntary auxiliary nurse, who was a one of those who nursed him through his rehabilitation, his main motivation was to get fit enough so he could tramp through the wild areas of his island home checking out the wildlife. Though his right arm was paralysed and he had bouts of memory loss, his heart, legs and lungs were fine. In fact he could out distance me even in the hardest going. One of his well-remember sayings was: If you’re only tired we’ll keep on, if you’re exhausted we’ll take a rest.

Most Sundays during the springtime my father and I set out very early in the morning carrying our packed lunch, a long light rope, binoculars, a tomahawk, a small calico bag full of six steel spikes, a medical kit, a torch, a magnifying glass, a ball of string and a few small cardboard boxes packed with cotton wool. It wasn’t just the birds we were after; we were searching out their nests and stealing their eggs. And I was there with him, the most agile, and possibly the most suggestible of his four sons, his apprentice egg thief and tree climber.

We didn’t steal every egg we came across, just those remaining sets my father needed to add to his collection. The collection numbered over one hundred and seventy different species. It was reputed to be the most comprehensive collection that was ever assembled in Tasmania. He had been collecting the eggs since he was eight years old. The gem in the collection was the egg of a Tasmanian Emu, a species that had been extinct since the middle eighteen hundreds. He told me his own father had found the egg when he was young man. That it was a Tasmanian Emu’s egg is disputed in some quarters, but the egg was definitely smaller and a slightly different colour than the mainland variety. My father was an honorable man and I can’t imagine he would have concocted such a story even if his own memory was somewhat unpredictable.

Such was his drive I sometimes considered that his main ambition was to collect a set of eggs from every single Tasmanian bird species and that his jobs as an itinerant fruit picker and cane cutter and later a teacher, a bank teller, and a Company Sergeant in the Great War were mere impediments to that paramount ambition. Even at the age of thirteen I thought this rather an obsessive and forlorn hope.

 My father and I covered a fair bit of territory in those days, sometimes not far from our home on the outskirts of Hobart and at other times to further destinations by car. Any place where there were heath lands, river grasslands, open bush, damp gullies, and the tall trees of the ancient forests whose height took your breath away. I often fantasized we were trekking through the Congo, the Amazonian Basin, the wilds of Patagonia and I don’t ever remember losing our direction, even though he never carried a compass or a watch. The sun, or failing light were good enough indicators of the time, and re-following those landmarks he’d mapped out in his head was good enough to guide us to our safe return. The fact that I was there to watch over him was becoming quite farcical.  

There seemed that no place was without birds and if you stayed long enough and still enough they would emerge and invariably disclose to the patient watcher where their nests were. Many nests were high up and by planting spikes into the trunk of a tree and a rope tossed over a bough higher up; smaller trees were quite climbable. My father would sit at the base of the tree with his bird and egg-identifying book and I would call down the type of material the nest was made from and a description of the eggs. Usually he could work out what kind of bird it belonged to.

If that failed I would take one egg, put into one of the cardboard boxes and lower it to the ground on a piece of string. If it was a bird whose eggs weren’t in his collection, he would then decide whether they were freshly laid or too close to hatching to preserve the shell. This was simply done. By holding up the egg to the sun the level of development of the chick inside could be readily seen. If there was no sun, then shining a torch was almost as good. If the eggs were freshly laid they could be “blown” by boring a hole with a needle at both ends of the egg and giving a few hearty blows at one end. If too close to hatching we would replace them and leave the vicinity as soon as possible to avoid unduly disturbing the birds.

Though, as far as I remember, we only took a dozen or so batches of eggs that he didn’t already have in his collection. Three, I remember well. A Red-capped Plover clutch we found at the back of the beach at Marion Bay, another two eggs which he thought were the eggs of a Forty Spotted Pardalote (though they could have been the more common Spotted Pardalote) we found in a hollow on Bruny Island and a Bassian Thrush’s clutch we found in a rotting stump near the magnificent tall trees of a rain forest near the Arve River. On his insistence we always took the complete clutch because he told me that with all their eggs gone the birds would lay again.

 And it was, I recall, this latter area around the Arve that I think my father revered the most. I remember him once sitting on a moss-encrusted log in the ancient forest shushing me to silence.

“Listen,” he said.

“But it’s so quiet,” I complained.

“Shush,” he said. “Listen, deeper.”

I cupped my hands over my ears, listening again. This time I heard in the distance the faint warbling of a thrush that floated on a wind you couldn’t even feel at ground level. The sound lent immensity to our surroundings.

“I nodded as if I fully understood because I knew that was what he wanted.

“It is the reason I survived those terrible years. All those days I spent in bed.  All this,” he said, waving his one good arm about, “Is my church.”

 Although, in spite of the attraction of such cathedral-like aspects as the rain forests with its giant trees; or those lesser trees that I could scale with ease and display my agility; my favourite sites were the river grasslands where there was an abundance of water birds and especially the habitat of the intricate weavers of dry grasses.

“How do they do it,” I had asked in awe at seeing my first Grassbird’s nest - so exact, so delicate in its structure, strung between a half dozen stalks of reeds, it swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. It was an intricate work of art.

“Ah”, my father said, “that is the question. I once saw two Wedge-tailed Eagles teaching their fledging to fly but I never saw a Grassbird chick getting a lesson in weaving.”

It was a question I haven’t found an exact answer to yet. Though in my father’s case it simply didn’t matter. He just accepted the marvels of nature as they were revealed...

 It was only after his death in 1981 that I really understood how deeply he must felt about the wilderness. During a walk in the Florentine Valley with a friend some years after my father’s death, and remembering that I had walked the same track with him years before, we stopped when we heard a distant piping whistle from somewhere above. We looked up and there framed in the canopy of branches; high up in the cloudless sky was a white Goshawk circling the sun. It was a wondrous sight and with the sunlight filtering through its wings it was almost translucent. There seemed a mystical quality. We were enthralled and stood there completely immobile for several minutes until we heard a distant sound – not the warble of a thrush this time, it was the cough and splutter of a distant chainsaw starting up. Being once again reminded of the present day reality my heart sank. I felt I was losing something special and something personal. What would my father have thought of the present day method of clear felling in such an area? I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d taken up his .22 rabbit gun and gone to defend his “church” against the forces of ignorance.

 As with everything else in my life; from what I do and what I see and what I hear and what I read, stories emerge; and so it was with my experience as an egg thief; some of these incidents were bordering on the mystical, some humorous and some frightening. One such story involved a disagreement between my father and the Tasmanian Museum in the nineteen thirties after he’d reported sighting a pair of Dollarbirds in the far northeast of Tasmania. He told the museum curator that the birds seemed to be in nesting mode. His observation was summarily dismissed. The record showed that there had only been two verified sightings of the Dollarbird in Tasmania since white settlement. My father was a stubborn man who would not back off. He had seen them and that was that. The following year he returned to the same area with one of his brothers and camped there for two weeks, but the birds hadn’t returned.

Knowing at the time he didn’t have a sophisticated camera I’d asked him once what he would have done if he’d seen them again?

“Maybe I would have shot one just to prove a point,” he said gloomily. Though I knew from experience it was an empty threat due more to his frustration that his word wasn’t accepted. He considered his word and his experience were irrefutable proof. The museum needed concrete evidence and he didn’t have any.

The second installment of the Dollarbird arose when my family and I were farming on the east coast and my father was visiting. My youngest daughter came home one afternoon and asked him about a bird she’d seen on her friend’s farm. It was a bird she’d never seen before. A bird as big as a starling, she told him, skewing along the windrows after insects like it was drunk.

“A cranky fan?” my father said.

“No,” she said, “It was bigger and noisier – a  kind of bluish-grey with a red beak and white spots under its wings.”

We didn’t see much of him for the next three days as he went looking for his Dollarbird, unfortunately for him, again without luck.            

But in some strange way he did get his point over to the Tasmanian Museum years after he was dead. In the time I lived in Cygnet during the nineteen nineties I had stepped out the back door on my way to the shops early one winter’s morning when right in the middle of the path lay the body of a dead bird. I had only seen such a bird as that in cages in Indonesia. I assumed it was some kind of escaped pet killed by the cold weather. But that bird wouldn’t leave my mind. I fretted about it for two days until I was driven by curiosity to find out what it was. I rang the museum and described the bird over the phone. I was asked to freeze it and bring it to the museum. It was eventually identified as a Dollarbird.

I must admit the following day I looked up at the sky with my sceptical eyes and wondered about all the amazing coincidences that had happened to me throughout my life. Was there some unstated law that threw up such unbelievable odds to make us reconsider our prejudices? Was Carl Jung right when he suggested there was no such thing as a coincidence, that it was a matter of syncronicity – an acausal connecting principle that would give meaning to a series of coincidences not explicable through notions of simple causality? Who knows? Of all the places that the Dollarbird could fall, it fell from out of a blue sky right at my feet. No doubt other birds could have lost their way and fallen somewhere in the mountains or in the deep forests, undiscovered, but even then that Dollarbird episode goes to the top of my list of unexplained phenomenon. And, as my father often said rather dismissively: “If it works, then it works, knowing why makes little difference.”

 The humorous story that emerged still resonates today and continues to gives me enjoyment. My father and I had been searching the tussocks in a small valley close to Hobart for the nest of a Bassian Thrush when up flew a flock of small birds with yellow backs. I asked my father what they were and it was one of those occasions when the name escaped him. He told me that he would think of it later.

Later turned out to be the following Sunday, one of those dreadful days when I and my three brothers were warned to be on our best behavior because our grandmother was coming to share our Sunday’s roast. To us kids grandmother was the granny from Hell. My mother’s mother was a Methodist to her very core. Her attitude towards life was denial, where laughter, dancing and singing were inventions of the Devil. She wore veils and dark filmy dresses that gave her body no shape, no character, other than that of a formidable battleship presence that should to be avoided at all costs, especially if you were young. On the threat of no lollies or pocket money, or any largesse for the duration of our childhoods, we four boys sat silent and immobile, chomping away at our dinner. Half way through the fruit salad with icecream our father sat up straight with a sudden grunt. He looked across at me, his blue eyes alight with a sudden realisation and almost shouted it out: “Tits, that’s what they were!”

In the deathly silence that followed I could hear the mantelpiece clock ticking out the seconds. Our grandmother’s face had turned a sickly yellow. She looked like she was well on her way to a heart attack. The rest of my family was giving a fair impersonation of being catatonic. Nobody wanted to comment. And when one of my brothers dropped his spoon on the wooden floor it could have been a bomb going off. It shook me into action. I was the only one who knew what my father meant. I looked at him across the table and tried to keep the tremble out of my voice. “Those birds up at Ridgeway last week,” I said.

“Yes,” my father said, “Yellow-rumped Tits.”

It was all too much for my brothers who began an uncontrollable giggling. They were banished to the back yard where the giggles became a kind of suppressed whooping. Our grandmother didn’t finish her meal that day, she left soon after. My father drove her home still wondering what all the fuss was about. When she was gone my mother gave us all a generous heaping of icecream in the backyard. “We don’t want Mum’s helping going to waste, do we?” she said.

 The frightening side to egg stealing came the following year when recklessly showing off my ability to climb, a branch snapped under my feet and I fell twenty feet to the hard ground below and was knocked unconscious. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance and spent three days there, my head wrapped in bandages, bruised and aching. Fortunately there were no bones broken and no lasting effects other than an acquired fear of heights - or at least a cautionary attitude when it came to climbing trees. I hadn’t realized before that such a thing could happen. I began avoiding those weekend jaunts with my father. I made up excuses. I became unusually keen to play football for my school, or do my homework.

But pressure, or conscience, got through to me eventually. So one day in the following spring I set out again with my father on a nest hunt. Only this time, he emphasized, we were merely observing rather than stealing eggs. “Just a short jaunt,” he said, as we set off up towards the Hobart Waterworks. He told me that he’d seen two nesting birds there and they could have been Leaden Flycatchers. He told me he had a set of the Satin Flycatcher’s, which were more common, but the other Flycatcher had eluded him. He had seen several pairs but he’d never found their nest.

“I just wanted you to help me check it out,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get a set of eggs. Not that I’m asking you to climb after your accident last year.”

“I’ll climb the tree if it’s easy,” I said rather recklessly.

It wasn’t. It was in a Eucalypt tree in a dense gully at the back of the reservoir. The first branches began several metres up the clean bole of the tree - too large for me to be able to put my arm around it for support. The only hopeful feature was that another smaller tree was growing close alongside. Small enough, I surmised, for me to hang on with one arm as I straddled the trunk and if I could use the spikes as steps to a height where I could toss the rope over a branch above the nest I thought I might be able to do it. I had climbed more difficult trees, though not since my accidental fall.

Though I didn’t tell him that. If he thought I couldn’t climb the tree I wouldn’t have to tell him of my fear. For at least an hour we sat very still on the ground each one of us taking turns to view the two birds as they came and went. “See that! He’s got cobwebs in his beak,” my father said. “They’re putting the finishing touches to the nest now. Can you see its back? Is it dark grey or more to dark iridescent blue?” There was no way to tell, we were directly below and there was little light in the dense surrounding trees. “It’s no good,” my father said. “We can’t tell what it is. It’s not worth the risk of the climb – not knowing.” I readily agreed.

The following week I couldn’t concentrate on anything. My schoolwork, which had always been mediocre, was plummeting. I even tried to do a bit of homework to get that nest out of my mind. At night my dreams were to do with trying to fly and falling - and dragging my feet through ankle-deep mud in a dismal, endless swamp. I had to do something. So the following Saturday I arose before sunrise and set off towards the reservoir reserve carrying a rope, a bag of spikes and a hammer.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I had to take another look. In the early morning light with no pressure to do or not to do, I stood at he bottom of the tree and felt optimistic. At first there was no sign of the birds, Leaden or Satin, but after a few minutes one of the birds came arrowing in. I saw its tail flick as it changed places with its mate, who then set off to catch its own morning insects. I made up my mind – it was now or never. Without thinking I hammered the first spike into the tree.

I had no memory of how I climbed the tree. The same way, I suppose, I had climbed trees before, one step, one hand, always keeping three grips at any one time and thinking of nothing else than the next move upwards. Even the monkey jump from one tree to the other I took with ease. And there was the nest in front of me with three eggs in it. I settled the eggs into the cotton-wool lined boxes I had in my pockets. “Thanks birds,” I said a little flippantly in my triumph. I’d seen in a movie once when the Native American Indian shot down his prey with an arrow and I copied him. But up there, in the cool morning air, even at that young age, I realized that the notion of thanking the beast he had slain for food and bird that I had robbed of its eggs was a human construct after all - to salve our conscience.

The next lesson I learned that morning was never to forget the salutary rule in climbing – it was much easier to go up than come down. I was turned backwards to the tree that I had to descend by. To turn around I had to stand with only a few gum leaves to hang onto, then take two steps along the branch and jump back to the other tree. That was when the fear really gripped me. That was when all my dreams of falling pierced me right in the heart. So I sat indecisive - perspiring.  How long could I sit there? How long would it be before I lost my balance and fell? Who would ever find me? I sat and I sweated and I worried, for a very long time.

But then I remembered one of the few things my father told me about the war and his near mortal wounding. The fact that he had been shot down that day in 1918 didn’t surprise him. He knew his time was up because his mother had warned him in a dream during the night that he would be shot. In his dream he saw her standing on the parapet before him. She raised her finger in a manner he knew so well and waggled it before his eyes. He believed the message but he had no alternative: he had to go. He was the senior Sergeant and the highest ranked soldier still alive in his depleted Company. If he hadn’t have given the order and gone over the top with the rest of his mates he couldn’t have lived with himself.

Remembering all that gave me the strength I needed. If he could then I could. I stood up, balancing with my arms outspread, and I turned, took two steps and leapt across the gap, and, unlike my father, I was saved by the sturdy bough that I fell into. 

I got home late for breakfast that morning. I didn’t care when my mother chastised me. And I wasn’t too surprised later when my father sadly affirmed that the eggs were the wrong kind of Flycatcher after all. I cared for his disappointment but not for mine. For hadn’t I had proved something that morning as my father had proved before me. Though what exactly that was I was never quite sure. But what I was sure of, that experience was a kind of catalyst, for even though my father and I still roamed the bush on and off for years after, we never cheated any bird out of its prime purpose in life - to go forth into the world and multiply…