It’s been a while and this piece has been sitting on my desktop awaiting this or that embellishment. And new things keep happening to interrupt the unfettered flow of creative juices. Long story short, it’s out of date, overwrought, and lacking a real point. Sold? Then read on!

I had a dream the other night that Braidwood was the Shire and we were merely Hobbits, traipsing about on big hairy feet and singing jolly songs.

Freud alone knows what that little lot means — but leaving big hairy feet aside, there is a grain of truth to this unlikely vision. Braidwood sometimes does seem a bit like a quaint magical settlement, hidden by a fold in the landscape and made up of cosy little dwellings wherein earnest rural crafts are practised. 

But it’s in the leaving of town that the likeness is most apparent — especially if you’re heading up one of the dirt roads that gird our local mountain, Gillamatong. The imaginatively named Gillamatong Lane, for example, is straight out of a fantasy novel. It’s just that you won’t find fantastical druids, horrific orcs, or fair and wise elves going about their business. The drama up there takes place on an avian plane. Yep, it’s for the birds.

Perhaps due to the excellent views the Lane’s two old dead trees afford over the surrounding bush, or an ample supply of delicious prey, or both, these few hundred square metres attract a variety of feathery folk, large and small, all of whom want to fill their gizzards. This is where we were privileged to observe the evening hunts of our lovely Kestrels.

Good vantage points like the two trees are critical — and therefore hotly contested — hunting spots. When you watch enough, you begin to see just how contested.

During the winter, it was the black-shouldered kite — which, as you may recall, was discombobulated by an obnoxious Noisy Miner — in charge of the bigger tree, watching over a vast terrain from his perch.

Later, I recorded an uneasy stand-off between a kestrel and a magpie, both availing themselves of the smaller of our two trees while studiously ignoring each other. It’s not clear why they chose this avian Détente: perhaps they were equally-matched by size and weight; perhaps the risk of mutually-assured destruction was too great.

Instead, they acted like schoolyard sweethearts after a squabble, feigning fascination with things over there, and in no way conscious of each other’s presence.

Then, during a later photoshoot, the kestrel’s dominion was contested by a willie wagtail, punching rather above its weight.

This was a very enlightening encounter, both for its insights into the hunting habits of the Willie Wagtail and for what it revealed of the raptor’s place in the, ah . . . pecking order.

What happened was, I turned up at the appointed place and time and was disappointed to see that there was no kestrel — but there was a wagtail busy hopping about the tree in search of food. And after casting about the nooks and crannies of the tree trunk, it found some — a nice, juicy male Common Brown butterfly.

I watched fascinated as the little bird thwacked the insect against the tree a few times, swallowed what it could, and spat out the wings. On their own level, these smaller birds are just as predatory as their bigger cousins.

Then s/he seemed to become distracted, abandoning the hunt and flitting about agitatedly. I refocused the ludicrous lens to the top of the tree . . . the kestrel had arrived! As I watched it assume its position at the top of the tall stump, a small black meteor zoomed past, unsettling the raptor’s usual composure. The wagtail wanted to have the last word!

And even though the Willie’s slanted white eyebrows will always make it the archetype of the Angry Bird, the look on this one’s face really conveys the resentment it was feeling.

The kestrel was unsettled enough to take off with rapid wingbeats and circle the paddock before returning to resume its hunting stance. It was an impressive display in a David-and-Goliath kind of way.

But just after Christmas, the kestrels left — a disappointment after having privileged access to their movements for such a brief time. Again and again, turning up at the time and place most conducive to a sighting, we have been met with bare branches.

That is, except for the little Willie Wagtail. If persistence is what it takes to win the day, this guy is undisputed victor in the two-trees turf war. And he’s the epitome of improvisation: chase him off his tree? He’ll hitch a ride on a nearby sheep — not a bad outlook spot if the trees are taken.

And then the other day, I noticed a large shape atop the largest of the two trees. It was one of those firehawks — a Grey Falcon! I had assumed that these had headed off somewhere for summer, but there it was, looking a bit annoyed as I peered at it. I wondered if its arrival had driven the kestrels away.

And just the following day, I witnessed the same fearsome predator relinquish its perch at the bidding of a couple of magpies. Birdie politics are obviously complex, but two magpies working in concert clearly trump one falcon.

I do have photos of these feathery bullies harassing the falcon, very far away, but for the life of me I can’t find them. Another factor delaying publication, I’m afraid.

But above all of this — far above — those magnificent wedge-tails circle and spy, unmoved by the feuding far below. Except just the one time, when for some reason (probably a rabbit), they descended to our earthly plane and I was able to grab a few rather poorly-composed shots.

And all the while, during the ceaseless wranglings of these feathery knights of the air, the lesser avian folk are content to get on with their own hunting. The Little Grassbirds — rather dull, diminutive creatures — use the fencepoles and wires as their lookouts, swooping on grubs and bugs as appropriate to their size.

Meanwhile the Welcome Swallows bank and wheel ceaselessly, only occasionally taking a break from hoovering midges and mites on the wing to perch on the fence and have a chat.

Thus, within the span of a half-hour’s brisk walk, a constant game of musical chairs — or musical perches — is under way. It’s amazing that this small area can sustain so much life — that the combined biomass of bugs, midges, butterflies and dragonflies is sufficient to attract all these intrepid hunters.

Within this space a thousand hunts and quests happen daily; it’s an epic saga written small — which is another way of looking at an ecosystem, with just a bit of drama added.

I tried for ages to tie up the Hobbit metaphor with a neat flourish, but nothing seemed to work. I thought perhaps all this activity represented a battle between good and evil, but it doesn’t really. I couldn’t identify what evil might be in this scenario: who is Sauron here? Certainly none of the birds. I tried making mankind fit the bill — after all, we have rather screwed up the entire planet and its invaluable ecosystems, have we not?

But that seemed somewhat clichéd. Is it death? Well, kinda . . . but that’s quite a dark view, really. To the natural world, death is merely the flipside of life — it’s what we strive to outsmart by surviving and propagating.

And then, today, while meditatively pedalling one of these dirt roads, my Garmin clocking my progress to the second, it dawned. Sauron here is time, of course! I nearly smacked my own forehead at the realisation — as an ex student of Eng Lit, this should have been obvious! Weren’t a large proportion of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets devoted to examining how love, children and poetry itself are ways of outlasting time? How many Renaissance poets urged us to carpe diem and make hay while the sun shines?

And this is what the denizens of Gillamatong are doing — they are seizing the day, every day, in the endless race against the passage of time. And the changing seasons, driven by the earth’s rotations, beat time for the comings and goings of our own Shire’s inhabitants.