Lately, I’ve been spending a bit of time with birds.
Yes, I know council elections are on the way, the cost of living is strangling our aspirations, some people still want to burn coal, the Middle East is blowing up, the richest and most powerful country on earth is becoming a two-lane highway to hell, but we can still learn a lot from birds.
For instance, they mind their own business, they live by their own rules, they live through their petty squabbles, no-one gets hurt and they all get along.
Right now, on the verandah, Bert the magpie arrives for his morning bread crust and burnt toast inspection. Suddenly, a squadron of noisy miners swoops through, all push and shove and machine gun fire chatter. Bert ducks his head into his wings as they pass, then continues his soldierly wait for a crust. He eyes me with his glittering little brown beads, and I notice a look of embarrassing disgust in them. He’s apologising for the ugly behaviour of his fellow avian just as a town mayor might to visitors from a sister city during a riot of football fans.
Birds are crazy wild things mostly oblivious to the dull routines of their sapiens neighbours.
They have their own villages and towns with honourable members and ruffians going about their business with dignity and bad manners in equal measure.
Every day there are a thousand squabbles, disputes, lordly announcements and joyous celebrations of which we are entirely unaware. And that’s just in my garden.
Out in the bush, things get wilder.
This week, I decided to get out there and see just what the hell was going on in this mad parallel world.
I sat on a log beside a billabong for a full half hour, just watching and listening to the world around me. There was a bird call that sounded like someone catching their finger in a door latch — a sort of “ketchick-ouch!” This was answered by the same call much further away. They sounded like burglars exchanging warnings.
A pair of sacred kingfishers came to perch on the branch of a submerged sapling about 10 metres away. They surveyed their world with busy head flicks until they both took off and swooped low over the dark water, their wings flashing electric green and blue in the sunshine.
Then, somewhere in the distance, a gunshot echoed through the trees. My first thought was “Why?”
I heard the crow’s elongated descent into weary despair and the tiny wren’s busy little chirp.
However many different calls there are — each one cuts through the curtain of sound with bell-like clarity.
They reminded me of the market barkers I used to hear on Saturday mornings in Brick Lane, East London. There must have been a hundred of them spread over a mile of street stalls selling everything from dinner sets to car parts, blankets, flowers and kitchen sinks. Each barker had their own tone and special call: “Roll up, roll up for bric-a-brac; git your plates half price.” And the best one: “Flowers for a fiver. You’re not buying a round of drinks. Looking at you lot, you never bought anyone a round of drinks.”
I recorded that on a cassette.
Back out here in the bush, sitting on a log, the market is a bit slower than a Saturday morning in Brick Lane. But the lesson is just the same. Everyone has a song, everyone cuts through and everyone gets along.
On the way back home, I noticed something in the middle of the path. It’s a perfectly intact bird’s nest — a gift from Gaia of the forest. I pick it up and examine its delicate circular threads of dried grass and twigs, mixed with twine and paper. It looks like a mad bunch of chaos, but it’s not. It’s a painstakingly woven piece of art that was once a home, but now it’s a useless piece of litter blown by the wind. Somewhere out there, a bird is building a new home, undaunted. Another Sisyphean lesson from birds — when life gets cruel and absurd, keep pushing the boulder and live in the moment.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.