It’s winter now — and following the freakishly wet summer we’ve just endured, we’re experiencing some deep cold, such that Archie’s water bowl freezes overnight and we keep the fire going all day.
When it comes to local wildlife — particularly the feathered kind — I expected a bit of a dearth, with all the kingfishers and the like having set forth for Indonesia or warmer places north of us. But it turns out I was looking for the wrong things. In fact, this is the season for the big daddies (and mommies) of the avian world: the raptors. That is, eagles, kestrels, falcons, kites and the like — and on recent bike rides over local topographic pimple Mount Gillamatong (907m), I have seen exemplars of all four.
Yes: within a square kilometre of two of grassy slopes dotted with scrub, there’s enough prey to support a pair of Wedge-Tailed Eagles, at least one Black-Shouldered Kite, two Brown Falcons, and a pair of Nankeen Kestrels. These are all super difficult to photograph: either they’re a speck circling high in the sky, or you spot one perched on a branch and it wheels away before you can frame it. Persistence, my friends, is key.
Slowly, my obsessive stalking of these fowl has revealed a few observations about some of nature’s most captivating creatures. While the Wedge-Tails like to circle in long, high sweeps, scanning for prey below with their incredible high-res eyes (think of them as the U2 spy planes of the birdie world), the other two spend a lot of time hovering, helicopter-like, at lower altitudes, systematically working over grassy paddock and scrubby field.
This hovering is wonderful to watch — the wings twinkle as the bird rides the breeze, measuring lift and pitch to the nth degree so that the eyes remain still and focused. It is miraculous. Unfortunately, WordPress won’t allow me to post any more video (and I have a nice one) without paying a ruinous annual fee, so here are some hovering stills (a contradiction in terms, I know).
Of course, this hovering brings poetry to mind, and yet again, Father G M Hopkins has it done to a tee in his sonnet the Windhover:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
(I left out the final three lines in which Hopkins turns the argument to bigger things).
It’s a depiction of consummate prowess: perfect control, singleness of purpose, supreme athleticism — all done with apparent ease. An image of perfection — every detail, every movement dedicated to one purpose. Hopkins, being a priest and all, takes this as proof of God’s presence in everything, but if you don’t believe that, it’s still a wonderful depiction of how the forces of evolution refine all things to best fulfil their purpose.
That’s part of what makes these creatures so fascinating: they are optimised to the nth degree for hunting, and sit at the very top of the tree (so to speak) — but this very refinement, which Hopkins celebrates so vividly, also makes them terribly vulnerable. Farmers may not shoot them these days in the belief that they attack livestock or game birds, and DDT, which accumulated in the fatty cells of predators until it killed them, is banned — but decades of habitat loss has reduced suitable terrain for them to hunt.
So it’s a big fillip to this obsessive that winter doesn’t mean no birds to hunt with ludicrous lens in hand. I’ve taken to nipping around the dirt roads of Gillamatong with Archie in the old 4×4 to see what’s up with the birds. And wondering why it’s taken until our third winter here to realise they’re there.
And then it dawned — they just weren’t there in these numbers before. In the wake of the recent drought and wildfires, they were making do elsewhere, and now they’re filtering back. They’re a symbol — if you’re into assigning symbols to phenomena — of nature recovering as best it can after those harmful events.
So now it’s a daily pastime to nip out of a lunchtime or evening to check out some likely spots for these amazing birds. This can be quite hit-and-miss, but over the last few weeks we’ve managed a few close encounters which I will document, with their accompanying photos (if they were any good) here.
Why this particular obsession? Well, I think it’s that Hopkins thing: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird.” The mere sight of a raptor perched on a high branch or hovering over a paddock makes this jaded old heart leap. And you can never get enough of that experience, now can you?