Noticing birds is my mother’s love language.
For as long as I can remember she has pointed out birds: from the rosy glow of an Adelaide Rosella in the grass, to the distinctive after-dinner “mo-poke” of the Boobook Owl, my mother noticed them and knew their names.
Throughout my childhood, she taught us to recognise all the regular birdlife that visited our garden. Even when we lived abroad, homesick for Magpie melody, she took the time to learn the names of England’s various Tits and Robins so that she could point them out to us like tiny colourful treasures.
I remember one particularly challenging family road trip: my sister and I squabbling for the neutral zone between car seats, guts queasy from twisty country roads. Hot tension is emanating from the front seat, the aftermath of a wrong turn. Poor navigation was a common source of family tension, both in and out of the car. The air is sharp and dangerous and each dry, tinder box breath threatens explosion.
But suddenly we are pulled over, parked in a roadside ditch, gumboots donned to slip through the mud to the hill’s edge. My mother already has binoculars in one hand, bird book in the other.
At first it’s just a dancing black blemish on a distant sky but soon the rest of us see it. A Red Kite, as endangered as these moments of quiet family joy, has gifted us relief from simmering tempers. A winged angel of mercy.
Is this why I find noticing birds so magical?
Fairy Wrens can be as enchanting as fairies themselves! If you flick through a bird book from back to front and tap the cover three times, a secret chapter appears: filled with griffins and unicorns, waiting to be identified.
The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds was gifted to me one Christmas by my mother, shortly after I left home (or flew the nest, as it were). The gift of noticing birds had been given to me long before my troubled and hasty exit from the family home, so this bird book was more than the gift of identification.
It was a thread that tied me to her, a guideline of crumbs in the forest, for me to find my way back to her. To find her with every White Plumed Honeyeater and Willie Wagtail.
Now, nearly 30 years later, my 1994 edition of The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds smells equally of old library and fresh air. It no longer lies flat. The creases in the spine are eager to reveal common searches, maps with varying blacked out locations and bird calls spelled phonetically.
How might those maps have changed since its publication? Bin Chickens darkening metropolitan maps? I remember being excited to see an Ibis, always in wild wetlands, never in urban wastelands. Would there be too many little maps of Australia with nothing coloured? Sightings so rare the publishers thought it easier to just leave them blank?
What if they were the birds destined to ease family tensions on long road trips?
A mother myself now, the bird book comes on family trips to campgrounds and beaches, our findings earnestly reported back to Grandma. The Rainbow Lorikeet page is thumb marked by small sticky fingers and crumbs hide in the deep valleys near the spine.
I teach my daughters to notice birds: get excited by Grass Parrots and Plovers and see actual Fairies at the bottom of the garden. Passed on like DNA, this will be their inheritance.
One of feather and bird song.
Tracy McNally
Tracy McNally is an Australian writer, poet and spoken word performer. Serving dark humour and brutal honesty, Tracy examines influences in her life such as motherhood and mental illness. Her work ranges from poetry to narrative storytelling. Tracy is a three-time state finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam competition, a regular feature across Adelaide’s open mic poetry scene, and co-director of Spoken Word SA.