Parrotsong by Sarah Armstrong

www.sarah-armstrong.com.au
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Up in the valley you are carried into the day on a wave of birdsong. You can never sleep in, the noise is vast and swelling, a cacophony of voices. And through it always, the thread of parrotsong. Strident, chatty, throaty. The forest surrounds you here. Nature holds sway, with rain, floods, spiders, snakes, weeds, mould and falling trees. As if she wants to take back her land. Animals are her forward scouts, parrots the cheerful advance party, rejoicing in this reversal of the urban order of things. Three Crimson Rosellas circle Noel’s house in a swooping, curling line of flight, skimming tree tops, inspecting the lie of the land. Their plumage is shocking vermillion, ultramarine blue. Six wings flashing, blurring, iridescent, and then they are gone into the forest, disappeared into shadows and close growing trees. Water drips from leaves, last night’s rain slowly making its way to the ground.

King Parrot

 The banana palm beside the verandah leans with the weight of its swollen purple flower –– a heavy package of petals opens to reveal small unformed bananas. King Parrots come to check on the fruit – in threes and fours they glide in and land, flapping wings akimbo. What colours! The males green and crimson, the females smooth polished green. One male moves awkwardly, purposefully down the flower stem, and his button eye watches you.

He hangs upside down to reach the nectar glistening at the tip of the pointed flower, indifferent to his own extravagant, lurid suit of feathers. You want to inch closer until you can touch him, take hold of that firm smooth body, quivering with flight. What is this human desire to touch wild animals, to have them look us in the eye, notice us? Is it forgiveness we seek or some kind of reconciliation?

A feather lies on the verandah boards, abandoned in the parrots’ flurried departure. It is no bigger than the tip of your thumb, fan shaped, downy grey touched with green, its filaments stirring in the morning breeze. You imagine it slipping from the bird’s body as his muscles pulled him into flight, unaware of the beauty he leaves behind

Mid-morning you hear her calling, and the harsh cries lead you to the top orchard. She is high, higher than you’ve seen a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo before, no more than a ragged-winged shape against the sun and the thin blue sky. It’s a dry day after weeks of rain, and a blanket of humidity rises around you. She makes wide lazy spirals over the orchard then heads east towards the ocean, coasting on unseen currents. A white speck in the blue – her cry still reaches you after she has disappeared behind the tallest trees.

Galah

 Needles of sunlight filter the green, moist air of the forest. This is the parrots’ domain – they navigate the trees like fighter jets, turning and corkscrewing between tight-packed trunks and looping vines. Groups of Rosellas, three, four, now six – fast-moving shadows in the dim light – call across to each other. Urgent, alert screeches, heralding the rain that sits ready in the air. It comes, beating its way through the canopy high overhead, striking the broad leaves, lifting the scent of humus from the forest floor - and you fancy the parrots avoid the raindrops, so cleanly do they slice the air.

In town, a family of Galahs hangs upside down from a phone line. A heavy summer shower has swept in from the north, filling puddles and masking the landscape.  The pink-grey Galahs hang in a row, upside down, sodden and delirious with the rain, their knobbly feet holding them fast. When the rain abates, they right themselves and smooth their damp tufted feathers, beaks sliding long strokes along satiny wing feathers.  Fluffing, stretching, chiacking, they take half an hour to arrange their glossy coats until the sun breaks through and they lift en masse into the sky and wheel away across the rooftops.

On the phone pole is a faded black and white poster of a Lost Cockatiel. He looks at the camera with one dark eye - thin claws tight on a child’s finger, inquisitive nervous head tipped to one side. Somehow scared into sudden panicked flight, he must have hunched on a branch - waiting, small heart beating fast - even as other parrots flew past, busy, purposeful. The poster is written in a child’s careful hand and dated three weeks earlier.

 

Rainbow Lorikeets

 At dusk a flock of Rainbow Lorikeets streams through the hazy slanting light and converges, chattering, on the palm trees that line the main street. This is the soundtrack of sub-tropical towns on nightfall - this impatient, cheery twilight chorus, forest-dwellers making do in town. As the air cools and light softens, more birds arrive - they jostle and screech and preen, preparing to settle for the night. On the street below it’s too loud to talk, too loud to think.People pass each other with a smile - tolerant, forgiving, enraptured. Always enraptured. They seduce us - the parrots. They are nature’s wild unruly seamless perfection. Noisy and unapologetic in their brilliance, they come to us and speak of the loud fragile beauty of this planet.