This week, I found a little bird lying on the ground below our loungeroom window.
At first, I thought it was a curled leaf, but this one didn’t move in the breeze, so I had a closer look.
Our Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds told us it was a red-browed finch from the firetail family, which flies in small flocks, feeding on seeding grasses from Cape York to Kangaroo Island. I thought that’s a mighty long dinner table for this little traveller who flew into our patch from the nearby Goulburn River forest, perhaps chased by those yobbos of the bird world — the noisy miners.
Of course, our tiny visitor was quite dead after smacking into a closed window during the final frantic chase of its little life.
We don’t often get to look at delicate wild things up close, so I picked up the little sprite and held it in my hand. It must have died recently because it was quite floppy, its head lolled from side to side and its body was soft. The two bright scarlet stripes on its head and one on its tail looked very rock and roll, a sort of dandy hipster ready for the dance hall. A spread of its wing revealed a golden collar dissolving into soft olive-green feathers. Its two paper-thin legs each had four clawed toes spread mid-clasp. How delicate and perfect it was.
It had everything it needed for feeding, mating, flying and living in a harsh world. A million generations had produced this survival kit — lacking only a defence against invisible windows. But then, windows have only really been around for a few hundred years, which, according to Charles Darwin, is a timespan too short for change.
Differences in the beaks of finches on the Galapagos islands formed the basis of Darwin’s world-shattering theory of evolution.
Our little rock and roll finch has a short stubby beak, perfect for picking seeds out of grass. Its cousin, the painted finch, has a longer, pointed beak perfect for finding seeds in the crevices of rocks in the semi-desert regions where it lives.
So, every species has its unique evolutionary journey, which makes it perfectly suited for its own niche in the world — including us.
When Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published 165 years ago, it caused outrage, and amazingly, it’s still causing outrage. Darwin’s book placed us in the great pool of animals, with our nearest relatives as apes, so it meant we were no longer at the top of the ladder and directly descended from Adam and Eve.
In some corners of the world, including apparently our own, the idea that our nearest animal relative is a monkey is still too difficult to grasp, meaning that for some people, empirical science is not the final arbiter of reality.
I spoke to an anti-evolutionist from our community just the other day. He is a hard-working, intelligent and reasonable family man. But he just can’t accept we share a common ancestor with other apes and Neanderthals. He said he found Darwin’s ideas “frankly insulting”. I didn’t want to lower the tone of our respectful conversation by saying his idea of man as the pinnacle of God’s creation was “quite frankly arrogant”. But I did think it.
Darwin, with the help of the little finch, brought us in from the lonely cold to take our place once again in the great circle of life.
With that thought in mind, I didn’t feel like putting our visitor’s perfect little body in the bin with the dog poo and food scraps. After all, its cousins had helped Darwin make his great leap forward. So, I placed it under a bush for the ants and bugs to do their work. It felt like the completion of some sort of circle.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News