Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [34]
Then they had noticed the birds.
They were everywhere: in water and reeds, trees and sky; and they were quite fearless. The children stared at them, wandered among them, watched and observed them with a wonderment that increased with every hour of every day.
They saw the wood-ducks; the ducks that nest in trees; that carry their young to water by the scruff of their necks, as a cat carries her kittens. They saw the tail-less swamp coots, nibbling wild celery as they floated by on self-made rafts. They saw the snake-birds, with their long rubbery necks and pointed-dagger bills. And the jacaras – the legendary Jesus-birds – walking the water on their long, disproportionate toes (that use the fragile underwater lily-leaves as stepping-stones). They saw dabchicks and zebra-ducks: marsh-bitterns and pelicans. And late one evening they saw the dance of the brolgas.
They were looking for a place to camp when Peter saw them: a cluster of eight or nine long-billed, stalk-like birds, slim, silver-grey, and elegant, standing one-legged on the water’s edge. As the children watched them they saw no sign; but suddenly – as if at a clearly understood command – the brolgas came to life, moved gracefully into a circle. One bird took up position in the centre. He was the leader: the leader of the ritual dance. Opening wide his wings, he began a stately pirouette, a slow-motion quadrille. The others followed his lead; in stylized step they pranced solemnly around the circle, their feet moving in perfect time, their wings rising and falling to the beat of unheard music. The dance went on for several minutes – more than five, less than ten – then, quite suddenly, it ended. As if at another command the brolgas broke circle, moved into a random duster, and took up their original one-legged stance gazing peacefully across the lagoon. The children passed within six feet of them, but they never turned their heads.
And the birds of the forest were as strange and wonderful as the birds of the lagoons.
The children never tired of watching them. They saw the mistletoe birds planting their crops: plastering tree trunks with the reeds of the parasites that would later provide them with food. They saw the hawks fanning their nests, bringing their eggs to the requisite temperature for hatching; the butcher-birds stocking their larders, impaling live beetles, moths, and fledgelings on the thorns of the iron-bark; and the rifle-birds, gilding their basin-like nests with the cast-off skins of snakes.
Every sunrise and every sunset the bird songs were near-deafening: a diurnal cacophony of notes clear and limpid, bizarre and unmelodious. The soft cadences of pilot-birds, the wolf-wail of soldiers; the croon of yellow-bellies and the sandpapery scour of scissor-grinders. While at night even stranger sounds echoed among the moon-white trees. The cow-like moo of the bittern, the yap of the barking owl, the coo-ee of the brain-fever bird, and rising above them all the nightmarish scream of the channel-bill: a maniacal shriek which terrified the water rodents into scurrying flight, making them betray their presence to the hovering bird.
No less wonderful than the birds were the trees of the forest with their parasitic flowers and vines.
The children had been a little afraid of the forest at first; it was so enormous; so dark and earthy-smelling, with tree trunks soaring skyward, and strange, evilly-fashioned plants choking each other to death in a slime of decomposing vegetation. To start with they had stayed on its edges, among maiden-blush of reddish brown and heartswood of emerald green. Then, becoming bolder, they ventured a little way in: to where sycamore vied with tulip-wood, and the cassias dug their quinine-producing roots deep into the fertile soil. And at last they dared the centre: the heart of the primeval wonderland.
Here they found a fantastic