by Rose Michael

“The bird mimics, me. Birdly. Stands still on the windowsill as rain picks up. Pours down. Feathers pasted together with some evil effluent into … lawyer’s robes.”

March fires have bird bodies washing up onshore. Black cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, crimson rosellas. Iconic natives – usually found on postcards or biscuit tins – cast onto our back beach. Not coated in oil but

turned to coal.

‘They look as if they’ve flown too close to the sun?’ you try.

I reply: ‘as if they might emerge, Phoenix-like, from flames.’

The ocean dumps them, like a farmer tipping dead livestock – drought-damaged crops – onto the steps of parliament house. Evidence of an extinction event. Our ecological catastrophe

brought home by backhoe.

‘Cockatiels are massing in the west,’ you say in April. We hear them on the radio, screaming down the wire. Native to wetlands, scrublands, bushland, their numbers fell when clearing began – for a while there few remained, but then: farmers’ crops proved as tasty as the diet they’d lost.

And now?

‘They’re making a comeback,’ I suppose. ‘Early settlers called them the Nymph of New Holland.’

You look at me with your head on one side. Bird-like yourself. It’s easy to see why you might be puzzled: cockatiels are hardly maiden-like. Quite the opposite. They aren’t so different – in size – to standard cockatoos. Only slightly smaller. Only slightly less likely to curl their crest aggressively. No wonder everyone assumed they came from the same family. But they’ve recently been reclassified. Not that I, of all people, am a stickler for taxonomies.

‘Nymph is what scientists call immature insects. Cockatiels look female until adulthood.’ Though they can breed well before then.

And have been. Wild birds hooking up with their semi-civilised cousins – those raised in captivity, who’ve learnt expletives from bogan owners. Not just inter-species, but cross-class copulation!

‘A poor man’s parrot, they’re highly sociable and easily bored.’ I guess. Keen to put their nut-cracking beaks to bad use. Red-gum decks provide the perfect fodder for mongrel birds. Causing cages to be flung open and our rejected feathered friends – the distinctive colouring identifying housebound variations – let loose. To reproduce

with local gangs.

Some city-siders believe the birds have it in for them. The detritus from their foraging – acorns and sticks and … shit – raining down on roads. A distinctly Aussie pestilence.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so

something else.

At the thought of talking birds targetting cars you turn your head towards me: homing in. Reminding me of all the aberrant females – nymph-like or not – found in nature.

‘Some species, in the western desert, are giving males the flick.’ I speculate: a scarcity of resources? Inefficiency of sexual reproduction? But if cloning were the answer, creating a society of queens who reproduced via virgin births, why did only one in a thousand species do it?

Because closed communities have higher deformity rates. Less resistance to parasites. Like a photocopier constantly reproducing an original until pixels become blurred; eventually distorted beyond recognition. I imagine:

chains of DNA strands uncoiling, uncoupling,

a blueprint fading to faint watermark. Sexual reproduction was expressly designed to create genetic difference – between generations, as well as siblings. Inviting variations which, might, result in atypical versions better equipped for new conditions. Mutations. Able to tolerate unforeseen, and unforeseeable, environments.

‘The brown butterfly?’ You open May hands. Is this a conversation? We exchange facts like a frontier trade. Swapping trinkets, trifles, titbits of flying things that neither of us quite knows how to use. Scientist-me meeting scientific-you; neither neurotypical.

A flight, a flutter, of amateur naturalists.

‘A one-degree rise in temperature has our plain old garden butterfly – the one with orange wings – emerge from cocoons a week earlier than last century.’ Which doesn’t sound too bad, but potential mismatches with other species could have a cascading effect. Unless connected animals and plants shift in sync, as temperatures rise and new weather patterns unsettle natural cycles, the whole ecosystem is at risk.

Was. Will be.

I mirror your palms, press mine together too. Think of kindergarten artwork: a page, folding closed.

‘As well as appearing earlier, our … common––’ I baulk at the word ‘butterfly can be seen in other areas.’ The indiscriminate feeders, which eat both native and introduced grasses, are already ubiquitous across eastern states. Where hadn’t they gone? Where wouldn’t they go?

Until it becomes so hot they estivate, undertaking that rare thing:

reverse

hibernation. Hiding from the heat of summer. Only emerging, now, to lay their eggs.

‘I see them,’ you say, ‘on hot days. In the early morning and late afternoon. On the ground, near garden sprinklers, orange-ing the air.’

June brings a fairywren. ‘Male?’ It’s hard to tell when they’re in autumn eclipse. Have shed the black and blue plumage that gives the superb blue its fairy-tale name.

‘Bird?’ You ask, as if it’s a verb. To bird.

As if it’s imperative: bird!

Our cryptic communications are as close as we come to this … catastrophe. All your friends; one day gone.

The smallest ever feathered hops forward and back. Fearless. So much food, why should she sleep?! No need to conserve energy when the air positively pulses with insects. All around us: trilling.

Thrilling.

‘They are so picturesque, particularly when perched together for warmth in winter. Our favourite bird.’ We voted it so again.

You peer into the bush where its nest must be. Or:

not. They’re famously unfaithful. I school my smile:

‘Those frisky fairies, living lives of torrid affairs and deceit!’ Consider the tiny, tufted wren. Or absence of it in the empty nest. ‘They rear families monogamously – chicks from one crop helping feed the next brood. Both parents frequently disappearing into neighbouring territories on romantic forays. Only returning home to roost shortly before dawn.’

I sense as much as see the passerine dart into darkness. Infidelity in animals is more common than people think, sexual reproduction in the plant world more rare than anyone would care. We are all just trying to survive – different ways of working towards

true difference.

‘The wrens?’

‘They’ve seen no side-effects from our endless urban sprawl. Are outcompeting sparrows in the capital.’ Everywhere you look: wild things winning out. ‘Colonies can be found across the city’s parks and gardens. They’ve adapted to our changed – changing – circumstance. Pretty cunning, for something so cute!’ I chuck you under the chin. Love stopping my heart. ‘Have learnt to respond to the noisy miners’ alarm calls, while ignoring their many other vocalisations.’

Clever, very clever. It almost makes me hope as you

watch her rodent-run, adopted to distract predators.

In July, we spy: a moonbird. Bodyweight doubled means she’s ready to fly

north.

‘The eastern curlew is nick-named for how far she’ll travel,’ if she lives: to be twenty. ‘To the moon and back! She doesn’t glide or soar but flaps like mad in her epic migration from our intertidal mudflats to her breeding ground in Siberia.’

She – we? me! – isn’t really a waterbird at all. If she falters over the ocean … Which more and more do, as the bird’s preferred feeding grounds are turned into factories and farms, city ports and holiday homes. We might have one of the longest coastlines in the world –live within coo-ee of it – but the beach that occupies our national psyche isn’t the stretch essential to the largest shorebird in the world.

‘Her internal organs shrivel to almost nothing, saving precious grams of weight. She digests her own muscles on route. Saves nothing for the way back.’

All that way – home or away: depending on which continent you consider her’s.

Unless, you’re right:

‘her home is the flightpath itself.’

A lone … crow? Watches us. Walks across an August garden. Hops onto the other side of sill. Beating black wings and looking at me – through me – with red-shot eyes. Warbling an earthy, unearthly, melody.

There is something familiar about our visitor.

And something foreign.

No carolling comes back. It’s bad luck, a single bird: I bob head, respectfully. Offer an almost, kind of, curtsey.

‘Birdy?’ you ask.

The bird mimics, me. Birdly. Stands still on the windowsill as rain picks up. Pours down. Feathers pasted together with some evil effluent into … lawyer’s robes. ‘Crows have consequence for coming journeys,’ but I can’t remember what. But I can’t remember who

ever knew that.

You aren’t listening anyway. Hands sudsing up her wings till nails turn talon with the stuff. Fingerskin crosshatched as avian feet. As she begins to sing. A sweet, fluting sound that lasts a minute or more. Our now-pied piper invites you to join in. Fluffs breast feathers. Pecks and picks to help clean and preen her emergent magpie self.

Not Corvid, but: related. Shifting from one leg to the other, so humanly. As if, we are!, family.

‘Their brain-to-body mass equals that of the great apes.’ I pass my old non-knowledge on. The ancients were right: highly intelligent. Singing so well – she, too, two!, sings so well – it’s no wonder they thought the birds would speak English …

if you could only cut that drop of devil blood from their tongue. Tongues.

‘Maggies can recognise a hundred faces,’ I say, so pseudo-wise. ‘Are less likely to attack those they know come September’s swooping season.’

Our solitary songbird has become

one of us.

‘Why?’ you ask, persistent, insistent, when I say a single sighting is considered bad luck.

‘---’

‘The other-era Victorians nearly hunted them to extinction.’

‘Why?’

‘---’

It’s my turn to shrug – look at me, learning from you. ‘Because death was thought contagious? Foreboding came from – with – their battlefield foraging.’

‘What battle? What field?’ My frame of reference is, thank God! not yours.

‘It was said they were left off the Ark for being neither raven nor dove. For not wearing proper mourning. Non binary bird!’

Apparently they sang as the saved were herded in. And swore.

Maggie can mimic four-score species – including human. You are right to make salutations, instinctively in keeping with the traditions of faraway ancestors you never knew. Never saw. Cawing loudly – as if you are her missing mate! Flapping wing arms. Blinking rapidly so you see – caw! – two birds instead of a single ill-omened one. Perched together at the end of the world. Repeating words,

becoming bird.

October plovers nest the dunes. Cute hooded dotterel hatch in the sand, run along the shore. Fluffy puffs of blown foam racing before

an unseen wind.

‘The canine curfew has had the desired effect.’ I say, to myself these days.

The extinction debt’s still there, though: new numbers may not be sustained. It’s a risky business – they have the longest incubation of any sanderling. Chicks can’t fly for the first month and are so very vulnerable, feeding at the water’s edge. Foraging in the seaweed wash.

Particularly if parents spend too long baiting humans away from their eggs. Leaving unhatched young to cook in the sun.

‘The loss of wildlife in what was once the state’s most biodiverse patch––‘

‘where ’roos were so plentiful they flocked like sheep’

––is on the turn.’

Wedge-tailed eagles breed. A November family circles us from on high.

‘See!’ I – eye, aye! – spy. Pointing skywards. Words drying up.

The one bird in the world that will win against drones – which the government swears are only for monitoring, by agriculture and mining industries. Only to

observe.

‘Sea!’ ––eagles float on dream thermals overhead. Suspended, supported by the close-pressed air. Ready to turn on a dime and

dive.

‘Fledgeling wedgies wingspans,’ I whisper, beneath human hearing, ‘can become twice that of metre-wide unmanned aerial vehicles.’

Take comfort in the thought. Feel hope, a giant winged thing, beat. And rise.

‘Larger, if they’re female.’ Mother raptors always are the most aggressive.

Raptors, in the top end, pick up burning sticks and twigs – firebrands no bigger than your finger. Drop them into dry grass to jumpstart a fresh blaze.

Firefighters catch them on camera. Solo and co-operative attempts. I say nothing, not wanting to give

the game away.

Black kites too, use smouldering branches to drive lizards and insects into their path. The birds having cottoned-on to how a fire front flushes out a feast. Barbecuing our favourite foods. Smoking out victims – smaller birds too: there is no species loyalty; let alone inter-species allegiance. We lick avian lips and fly fly fly betwixt.

‘This is a true story’, I thought when I finished my third literary spec-fic novel Else. ‘It just hasn’t happened yet.’ What did I mean? That I set out to write about climate catastrophe, but instead wrote into neurodiversity. From the biggest (im)possible perspective, to cognitively estranging conversations closer to home. Hope was a conscious decision. A tale about the end of the world became, somewhere along the way, the birth of a new one. For every fact that seemed incontrovertible, I dreamt an alternative. I sought species on the brink of extinction to find a way in to an alternate future. Words are concrete, and allusive. Conclusions elude. This extracted experiment is my ‘speculative fabulation’, as demanded by Donna Haraway: a way of testifying and replying to our lived and living environment. Flyways is – more, and less – coalesced into an imagined, multiple, metaphoric truth. Home is … at either end of the road, or neither end of the road? Home is the road. And the way, the writing, flight itself.