[first published 15.11.2024 on Substack ]
It’s misty here in the cool temperate hills of NSW, Australia. Cool, temperate – both words sitting carefully in some kind of restraint, a withholding. And this caution is folded around me these days – like an enormous swathe of tulle I can’t quite figure out how to fold or roll away. Wrestling with a giant-sized mozzie net!
The birds don’t mind the mist and because the lit light grey of it cancels out the background beyond the gum trees, their flight paths and branch-landings are easier to see. Amongst the still wetness of the trees and the slight pale drift of moisture, the birds are busy as ever – acrobatic spies, watching everything.
A closer bird experience is at the back door. In a dinged up metal rubbish bin, that we keep dry kindling in, some scrub wrens have set up their nest. Scrub wrens don’t look like the long-tailed handsome blue and black show-ponies that dance around the garden here (even their name is fancy: superb fairy wren). These scrub wrens are just little browny-green birds – round, bossy, flittering, busy – with a white slash above their eyes which make them look frowning and cranky. Certainly, when I carefully peered down into the bin, after seeing an adult land on the edge with its beak full of something pale and wriggling, its outraged yellow and black eyes stared back hard enough for me to say ‘Sorry!’
It’s still a busy world out there, even if I feel muffled, uncertain. Cool temperate.