One year I built myself a little nest in a green tent, surrounded by moonahs and gumtrees. Inside, I had an old embroidered tablecloth, its coloured threads stitched in swirls. I had crocheted rugs, a bean bag, a small seat and a floor covering.
From the tent I felt and heard the beauty in many small things: the way the light came through the fabric walls; the birds, so close to me, feeding in the wet soil; the magpies singing all morning from high up in the dry branches of the gumtree; tiny wrens of yellow and grey, a mass of them flitting in the tea tree; wattlebirds clacking; and the lift and lilt of the currawongs carolling.
Currawong whip! There was the symphony of the other birds behind them, but the sense of presence, the uplift and the swirl, the heft and weight of existence, that came from the currawongs.
The pied currawong (Strepera graculina) are named for their onomatopoeic song. They nest in a bowl of sticks, lined with grasses and other soft material, usually high up in a eucalyptus trees.
Black, with flashes of white under their tails, their habitat is eastern Australia, distinct from some species of currawong that live in Tasmania, the grey currawong, and the black currawong which inhabit southern areas of Australia.
Known to raid other birds’ nests, these beady-eyed, bulletproof birds are not always appreciated. They stamp their claim on places and spaces as they land with a thud on the protea limb, with a clattering on the corrugated iron roof and with a clunk on the wood paling fence.
When I ask urban ecologist Darryl Jones his opinion of currawongs, he muses: “Hmmm. Evil-eyed marauders or simply clever characters?”
A woman tells me her family calls them “caravan park birds”, and I think that suits them, for they are birds that sing to me of escape and travel. They are an adaptive species, moving through changing landscapes and climes. Once a bird mainly found in the highlands, who visited the lowlands in winter, they now have a significant presence in the urban zones of the eastern states.
Jones, author of the book Getting to Know the Birds in Your Neighbourhood, says of the currawong: “They are indeed on the move but it is more altitudinal than longitudinal. It’s still – at least partially – climate related. In recent decades they have found that towns provide lots of resources they can use and a lot have opted to stay low and even breed at the lower latitudes. And because they are incredibly efficient nest predators, [and] some are now breeding in the same locations as other birds, they are having a huge impact on the smaller species in particular.”
But they are not all displacement and destruction.
The currawong also has a role to play in the raising of other birds’ eggs, playing foster parent to the chicks of the channel-billed cuckoo, who lay their eggs in the currawong’s nest and then rack off to let the currawong raise their babies. Currawongs’ own chicks may perish in the process, but this is nature: brutal, adaptable and interlinked.
As David George Haskell, author of The Songs of Trees, writes:
We’re all–trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria–pluralities. Life is embodied network.
Not so long ago, as part of this network, I had to confront my own mortality. During radiotherapy treatment, while the blasts of 40 gray targeted my breast and chest wall, I had asked for a soothing soundtrack to lift me through the fear. The radiologists had served up birds.
Each time I had to hold my breath against the blasts, the birds held me safe until I was able to breast the oxygen wave and breathe again on the shore.
When I hear the currawong’s song, it is to me an invitation to travel through time, space and hopefulness; it’s a flight path that speaks to me of safely coming home, to build my nest and notice life and all its songs around me.
From the high ranges to the cities, from the lowlands to the caravan parks, the currawong’s songs have been one of my sustaining soundscapes. Thank you, pied currawong, for the uplift and the swirl, and for the capacity you’ve given me to land my own existence.
• Anna Sublet is a freelance writer
The Australian bird of the year poll launches on 25 September 2023
