Tuesday poem: Palm cockatoo
October 9, 2023
Palm cockatoo Heads like a child's drawing of bird heads, huge beak and feather mane, flopping, last extant beat-poet, croaking of things hep and cool. Man, you hit bedrock on that arching drum, selecting the sticks that give the deepest echo, sound playing through that tall wooden amplifier, from dark roots to hazy blowing sky. You contemplate the waving tops of tropical trees, plumed angel-head, stylish in your deep black daytime rhythm. Inimitable pulsing punctuation, beaky accent perched above the forest's bright green flow.
PS Cottier
(Image copyright Birdwatching Tropical Australia)
I have posted this poem before, many years ago, however I just saw Palm Cockatoos in the flesh (or feather) for the first time up in Cape York. The male uses sticks to drum on hollow trees, something possibly unique among non-human creatures. (Although we do tend not to see, or hear, things that other species do.) My left shoulder boasts a tattoo of a Palm cockatoo; over ten years since that was inked I saw one.
The photo is of the one we got a good look at; I also saw a couple in flight. We saw Golden-shouldered parrots on the way up, an equally special bird that nests in termite mounds. It is unfortunately one of Australia’s most endangered birds.
The next bird I really want to see is more common. The budgie (the wild one) has always evaded me. I’d love to see a large flock of them in the wild. Occasionally one is seen in Canberra, but they are escapees from aviaries, given away by size and colour, probably wondering where all the seed went.
Poem: Plains-wanderer
April 3, 2023
Plains-wanderer Pedionomus torquatus Someone took a quail and put it on a rack. It hasn’t stopped being surprised, and looks around comically, this tiny survivor, this left-over, balanced on gum-boot yellow legs. Or perhaps it is shocked by all the sheep, the cats, the fox, the foul apparatus introduced by recent arrivals, cockier than any cockatoo? Plains wanderer likes the quiet life; endless stubbly land it punctuates like a soft bracket. Last of its kind, all it needs is space unruffled, except by herbs, and the female’s russet red, blooming like a tiny sun, as she calls to smaller moon of male. PS Cottier
JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This year I was lucky enough to see the Plains-wanderer in the wild, which is truly a unique bird. The female is much larger than the male in this species, a bit similar to some birds of prey. But it is a truly harmless bird, and it was quite moving to see it hiding in the grass.
PS Cottier 