Stillness

This morning and yesterday were still. Not silent, for the air was full of birdsong, of great variety. Singing birds seem to heighten quietude. Chirping, squeaking, squwarking, twittering, pipping, pinging, whistling, cawing, cooing, ooming, choffing, ringing, honking. The screeching cockatoos have been absent fortunately.

The crow's nest a hundered feet above the ground in the pine tree at the lower end of Quinn Rd. seems to have been abandoned. Last week the pair of crows were mercilessly harassed by wattle birds in what looked like a territorial battle. Then no crows in that group of trees for a couple of days, but always wattle birds. Yesterday I saw a crow carrying a stick towards trees a couple of hundred metres away on Launching place Rd. It looks like the crows are starting again in another location. Another large pine tree behind messmates and peppermints seemed to be the crow's destination. They maybe prefer pine trees.

Last week I saw a quail in the yard of a house in Quinn Rd. The week before young Pip lept back in fright from the fence of the house at the top of Launching Place Rd., in turn giving me a start. A wild duck flapped as she rose, disturbed as we came past the other side of the picket fence. She hurried away along the side fence with her seven chicks in tow.

The bellbirds were back in the messmate opposite our lower drive this morning after a few days of no sign or sound of them. Their recent return has not yet become a full scale invasion and occupation like we had for several years, let's hope it doesn't. The wattle birds, who have built up in numbers, may be deterring them, also the currawongs who've not yet seasonally disappeared as they often do.

It seems to a constantly changing struggle for ascendency amongst the aggressive and territorial birds. It a shame that the aggressive types seem to adjust to man's intrusion into the environment better and we therefore have so many of them and less of the shyer types. Birds are all beautiful in their own way but birdworld is ruthless; chooks kill off sick comrades, so many species feed on the young of others, crows pick the eyes out of newborn lambs.

The strong survive.