Chenonetta jubata
The night begins with an excuse:
if I go for a walk to the creek, the path will take me past the house of
somebody I want to see. I send her a
text message; I ask her if she’d like to join me. We’ve walked the same route once before. She replies that she’s not at home, and with
that small announcement – less than one-hundred and sixty letters, a smattering
of pixels on a screen smaller than the palm of my hand – I’m absolved. There’s no reason to go for a walk which I
never really intended to take and which was only ever an excuse for something
else. If I stay at home and watch
television instead nobody will ever know.
Yet there’s a part of me, always,
that insists that such subterfuge and deception – however innocent, however
innocuous – is somehow corrupting.
There’s a noisy part of my mind that insists that an action, once
declared, must be acted on. So I put on
my shoes and I walk towards the creek, down the street, into the cool
mid-summer twilight.
I decide to take the high road,
left along Clifton Hill’s esplanade and then across the old stone bridge that
carries Heidelberg Road
across the Merri Creek. In places such
as this, at odd intervals here and in North Fitzroy, the creek cuts a deep
gorge and is flanked by cliffs five or ten metres high on either side. In a recent winter, in a heavy downpour on a
poorly lit road at night, a woman missed a corner and drove her car into just
such a gorge, injuring herself and killing her elderly mother. Perhaps I’m thinking of this when I walk
along the footpath across the bridge and a car passing barely a metre from me
in the other direction has a loud and sudden blow-out: it happens right next to
me, and I leap and shout in shock and fright, and when the car stops twenty
metres down the road I hesitate and then go to make sure the driver is
okay. She is; she leans across from the
driver’s seat and asks me what the damage is.
I look and tell her that her front left tyre is completely ruined. She asks: and the back? The back’s fine, I assure her, and she thanks
me, and so I feel myself absolved of obligation. I continue on my walk.
The sound of traffic on Heidelberg Road is
ever-present, as is the sound of the Eastern Freeway a kilometre away, but
between them is Yarra
Bend National
Park which in places has the appearance of almost
pristine bushland. On the western fringe
of the Park the bike path along which I’m walking skirts across the top of the
highest cliff above the Merri Creek: signs warn of danger but at one point a
look-out has been built so that walkers and cyclists can gaze at the trickling
water below. That water is at this
moment clogged with algae; yet the creek is distant enough that it appears
picturesque all the same. I’m moved to
take a photo on my phone, looking north.
Across the creek, to the west, somebody has several years ago carved in
the grass of the hillside an enormous representation of a Heron (Ardeidae),
like the chalk Horses (Equus ferus)
found in the English countryside. Behind
me I hear the usual commotion of Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus)
flying in screeching formation high in the open air; something moves me to turn
and watch them and when I do so I notice the unmistakable shape of a Goshawk (Accipiter) flying above the
eucalypts. Goshawks are predators of
small birds, and even this far into summer the Noisy Miners (Manorina
melanocephala) and other birds chase it, harassing it in the sky lest it
should think to descend into the trees and hunt for their young offspring.
I leave the lookout, trying to
chase the Goshawk too in my own restricted, earth-bound way; but by the time I
rejoin the bike-path the bird has already disappeared into the trees. But I’m walking again, anyway, and so I
continue, and reaching a point where I might turn back I feel suddenly that to
go home now would be too soon, so I continue, along the bike-path, around the
corner, under the high concrete arches of the freeway where young Pigeons (Columba
livia) are cooing tremulously.
I cross the small footbridge over
the Merri Creek adjacent to the freeway; only a few metres to my left is the
broad Yarra River.
The water is dark, though at eight PM the sky is still light. In a large expanse which until only a month
ago housed demountable buildings and refurbished shipping containers there is
now just bare earth, though grass is starting to regrow. Just out of site, below the steady roar of
Dight’s Falls, bright new metal houses the new fishway which has been completed
at last, just when it seemed that it never would be. Through the grilles you can see the water
rushing through ever-narrower chambers, rising gradually but inexorably from
the lower river to the elevated water above the falls. Perhaps fish are passing there already, discovering
new routes and mapping them in their minds.
The sound of all that water
collapsing in on itself fades quickly as I walk back towards the creek’s
ingress. I find a gravelly ramp down to
the water and I squat there, watching a Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)
stretch its long wings like a scarecrow on the far bank. I take my eyes off it for just a moment, to play
with my phone, to write something on twitter – unthinkable for me only six
months ago – and when I look up, inexplicably, silently, the Cormorant has been
joined on its log by an Intermediate Egret (Mesophoyx intermedia).
The new bird is in its breeding
plumage: great fronds of wispy feathers erupt from beneath its wings, and as
the Cormorant folds its black wings and tucks its head to sleep the Egret
passes its beak carefully over those brilliant white plumes, putting each
filament in order, moving its head down the shaft of each feather again and
again until its plumage is tightly zipped back in place. Down by the water the temperature is dropping
and even as I begin to shiver the day-time birds are huddling deep into
themselves, nestling in the warmth of their own feathers.
Tiny creatures, fish or insects,
unseen, disturb the river from below, and the water is pricked with a thousand
shifting holes and interruptions as the surface is broken by miniscule
mouths. From time to time the wind stirs
and gives the river goose-pimples. As
the sky slowly becomes pale and then begins to darken, clouds of insects begin
to hover above the river, and as I gaze through the swarms towards the Egret
and the Cormorant on the far bank it’s as if the birds are being projected on
old film stock, rich with speckles and blemishes.
Abruptly, my attention is
interrupted by an unfamiliar call: a sort of squelching yelp, a quack and a
croak all jumbled together as one. I
look sharply to my left and see gliding down the river, low above the water,
from some unseen hidden roost, a Nankeen Night-heron (Nycticorax caledonicus). It is only the fourth one I have ever seen in
my life; only a week and a half earlier I had never seen one at all. I’m astonished that a bird that long seemed
so elusive and unseeable should be so casually flying down the Yarra River. I’m even more astonished when it alights on
the same log already occupied by the Egret and the Cormorant. They look up briefly from their roosts at the
newcomer but return without fuss to their sleeping positions: heads tucked,
legs straight, perfectly still. The
Night-heron has been still all day, and now it begins to hunt in its crouching,
hunch-backed way, peering intently into the water.
The Night-heron’s activities are
just beginning, but every other bird is turning in to roost. A pair of Australian Wood Ducks swim past me,
up stream; a male and a female. They see
me and briefly turn towards me, and for a moment I can see the feverish
activity of their legs beneath the water, beneath the serene stillness of their
bodies as they glide against the current.
After inspecting me from a slight distance they turn again and continue
on their way. The male is rich chocolate
brown and pale grey, and as he swims across the surface of the river, which is
now still with evening, the colour of the trees and sky reflected in the dark
water match his plumage exactly.
Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org
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