Yes, I live in the Eastern Suburbs, though I don’t own an SUV and I don’t dress half my age. I realize I’m compromising my anonymity somewhat by admitting where I live, but don’t come a-stalking. I’m a cop’s sister now, as my brother proudly called me in the middle of some quality sleep to inform me last night.
So, to the birds. It’s quite a cast of characters. Leading lights include:
1. Cockatoo
Call: ‘ARAAAAAARK! RAAARRRR! EOOORRRAAARRK!’
Not very pleasant first thing in the morning. Cockatoos for miles around home in on the large palm tree in my back yard. They love to peck at the trunk and pull it apart. On many a still summer’s day the silence has been broken by an abrupt thump as a large branch falls to the ground. If you step outside and look up, there is inevitably a cockie smirking back down at you with a distinctly challenging air.
A mutual friend tells me that our neighbour secretly hates our palm tree. He is terrified that it’s going to collapse one day, squashing his house and his yuppie renovations. But the cockatoos only peck at the loose bark, not the actual core of the tree. Maybe he thinks the entire trunk is riddled with cockatoo tunnels?
2. Alarm Clock Bird
Call: ‘Bip-bip. Bip-bip’.
Nowhere near as loud as the cockatoo, this bird is nevertheless just as annoying in its own subtle way. It wakes you up slowly, as you gradually become aware of a hotel alarm clock-style, insistent beeping in the distance. It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a nice, civilized lie-in with this bloody bird politely indicating it’s time to get up.
I’ve no idea what species this bird really is or what it looks like. I can’t help wondering if it’s a reincarnation of my grandma. She was incapable of letting people sleep in too. 7 am on a holiday and you’d be woken by the floorboards on the landing outside creaking cautiously and a quavering voice saying “errrrr…Sprite? It’s seven o’clock!” I would of course reply, “GRANDMA! I’m TRYING to SLEEP!” Grandma: “Oh, that’s ok, love! No need to get up.”
Further sleep would be an act of iron self-discipline, accompanied as it was by crashing pots and pans from the kitchen and hideously cheerful local radio turned up loud. Then, “Sprite? It’s just pipped eight.” “GRANDMA I DON’T CARE WHAT TIME IT IS! I’m TRYING to SLEEP!” “That’s all right, love, I’m just telling you so you know. You don’t have to get up.”
Poor grandma, I do miss her. Perhaps next time I’m tempted to hunt down Alarm Clock Bird at 6:15 am and smack it on the snooze button, I’ll think of her and forgive.
3. Minor Third Bird
Call: ‘TOOOOwit? TOOOOwit?’
This one woke me up this morning. I worked out the interval (a minor third) for old time’s sakes, just exercising my musical listening skills from the days when I used to take music exams. At the end, the examiner would make you sing notes and recognize chords played on the piano. It was called ‘aural tests’, and God, how I hated them. I don’t know what an augmented fifth sounds like and I never did. I used to get so confused when practicing that sometimes I couldn’t even distinguish between fifths and octaves. For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, all you need to know is, that makes you look really, really stupid.
Minor thirds are quite interesting, actually. They can be heard all the time in folk music, at least in the West. It’s like, whenever people spontaneously compose tunes, they always seem to be in a minor key with minor thirds as a key feature. I’m talking about people who have no formal musical training – it seems to come naturally to people. Football chants too; they’re often built round a falling minor third. So I was intrigued to hear cheery little Minor Third Bird doing his thing. Could it all Mean Something? I’ll leave it to the experts to research. It all belongs to the murky world of the physics of music, I’m sure.
4. Rainbow Lorikeets
Call: ‘Squiggilit! Quiggle krrrrllll splitt!’ (or something like that. It is hard to transcribe bird sounds in English script.)
All very high pitched, like somebody washing windows enthusiastically. The Man has special penchant for these birds. He is happy to shoot out of bed in the middle of dream sleep as soon as he hears them trilling away outside, crying “The birds are waiting for me!” He runs outside in his sleepwear, doling out bread soaked with lavish spoonfuls of honey.
So last year we were pretty excited to see ‘The Parrots of Telegraph Hill’, a gorgeous film/documentary, very sweet, about an eccentric man who lived in a San Francisco park and basically befriended a flock of wild parrots. It certainly had a profound effect on the Man, who now fancies himself as the Sydney version, and I think he secretly hopes he will become famous and have a film made about him. Shortly after we saw the film he decided he wanted to name our lorikeet visitors. “Sprite, what shall I call this one?” He’d ask, nonchalantly. “How about you don’t bother?” I’d say, bundle of fun that I am. In the end, he seems to have lost interest in naming them and becoming an official eccentric bird man, as we only ever get two lorikeets feeding in our yard. They are an aggressive couple and won’t let any others come and share their honeyed treats, cruelly thwarting the Man’s dreams of stardom!
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