Early one morning on the day following my son’s arrival back in Australia
after three years working overseas he emerged grey faced and jetlagged from his
bedroom muttering, “I can’t believe how noisy Australia is.” As we were then staying 15 minutes from town
and the nearest neighbour was almost a kilometre away, I was confused. He said, “The birds. Australian birds must be
the noisiest in the world.”
I’m not sure how true
this is, but in the Australian bush there are dozens of small birds that add
layers of sound to the environment.
Yesterday afternoon we
made the mistake of taking a picnic out to a floodway on the Old Normanton Road. Why a mistake? The sky was blue, the birds were singing, the
creek was running, and there were flies in the millions. Trying to breathe without inhaling a fly was
difficult enough, trying to eat without taking in a mouthful of flies was an impossibility.
Insects are breeding by
the billion in the west at the moment. The
trees and grasses are flowering and the bird noise could wake the dead. So there was some compensation for the discomforting
flies. Peewees, magpies and crows were
making a racket. The usual black kite keeping
a close watch on me was joined by a pair of white bellied cuckoo shrike
perching high on dead branches and a rufous throated honey eater hiding in the
spikey foliage of a Prickly Acacia.
Meanwhile a willie wagtail chattered and complained when I drew too
close to her nest.
When we arrived home we
had to vacuum out the hundreds of flies that had ended up in the car.
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