Sometimes you are blessed by accidents of geography or circumstance.

Me? I think I’m blessed by a bit of both.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to see very ordinary birds.

Sometimes very special birds come to you.

The dawn chorus at my house can be a deafening cacophony, particularly when the Fig tree just outside my upstairs balcony is in fruit.

About three times a year the eponymous Figbird Spechotheres viridis takes charge and at the height of the fruiting season – when the fruit is “cooked” as locals say – flocks of Figbirds descend on the Fig tree outside my bedroom to gorge themselves on its beautiful golden fruit.

Sleep be gone at dawn when a hundred Figbirds make their percussive “pow pow pow” calls twenty feet from the pillow.

This bird, with the red skin around its eyes and sulphurous plumage, is an adult male.

Usually the duller female – none the less beautiful with her cafe au lait plumage and blueish skin around here eyes – is the vigorous defender of this prized tree from other species that want their share of its bounty.

And there is no shortage of other species wanting a taste.

This White-gaped Honeyeater Lichenostomus unicolor is a common local always looking for a feed.

And at first blush I thought this noisy intruder to be a Little Friarbird Philemon citreogularis but my Facebook friend Carol Proberts reminded me that – due to the shape of the head and lack of eye-stripe – that this charmingly ugly bird was in fact a somewhat less common Helmeted Friarbird Philemon buceroides that has dropped in for a feed.

Another of my favourite birds is the Varied Triller Lalage leucomela – a quiet – at times – skulker that sneaks in and grabs fruit from under the keen gaze of the female Figbird.

The Varied Triller is a smaller member of the Cuckoo-shrike family Campephagidae and are found in New Guinea and from about the Sydney area to the tip of Cape York Peninsula, in the moister parts of the Kimberley and throughout the Top End.

Apart from the bounty of fruit, dense trees like Figs provide plenty of cover for birds seeking a few moments respite from the chaos that ensues out in the open air – remember that every bird is either prey or preying – and more than a few take time to park for a few seconds or more in the dense foliage.

This Spangled Drongo Dicrurus bracteatus had a brief spell before taking off with it’s equally garrulous partner.

I’ve taken quite a few shots of Drongos – avian and otherwise – in my time, but this is the first time I’ve caught those beautiful blue spangles – hence the name – on this adult bird’s chest.

Another – less spectacular and common but no less beautiful – bird that roosts in the Fig tree is the common Bar-shouldered Dove Geopelia humeralis.

Last – but by no means least – of the birds found outside my bedroom window is this immature Forest Kingfisher Todiramphus macleayii that I often see – and hear –  perched on the power-lines outside my house making its lonesome call.

And finally – the King of the Air of the Top End.

If you are in Darwin in this season take the time to stop and watch.  Look up into the sky. Now and right through the dry season you will, on any day, see these magnificent Black Kites, Milvus migrans.

Now you see them in “kettles” of three hundred or more climbing on still, steady wings, wing-tips feathering the breeze, gliding and soaring on the faintest of thermals high into the sky.

Then pouncing – all graceful shapes cut out of still air – onto a stray discarded chicken-bone thrown by the town drunk onto a city street.

I could watch these birds all day, all week and all year.

And do.

And will – as long as I have breath and eyes to see.

All this and more I see from the balcony of my bedroom.

Am I blessed or just lucky?

I caught up with Nate Rice in his small office on the top floor of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, a squat building tucked away in a corner of Logan Square in downtown Philadelphia.

Nate’s office – not much bigger than a broom cupboard – is a mess. He sits at his desk surrounded by books, papers, the detritus of his latest field trip and his dirty laundry and tells me about his life and work with birds.

Nate is in the office but, like all field biologists, is looking forward to his next field trip “I became a biologist because I like to be in the field – not because I like to sit behind a desk. If I don’t get into the field for a couple of months every year, if I don’t get to places where there is no light pollution and no humans … I go batshit crazy.”

Nate is the latest of a long list of esteemed ornithologists that have had charge of the Academy’s collection of over two hundred thousand specimens.

As Nate tells me “Some of the most famous ornithologists in the world have been associated with us – John Audubon, Alexander Wilson, Rudolph Meyer De Schauensee, James Bond, Leo Joseph, Frank Gill – all of those folks have worked here and contributed to the collection and to the growth of the collection.” The Academy dates back to 1812 and has been on this site since 1876.

I’ve come to the Academy to visit the collection of John Gould’s Australian birds, many of which were collected by his field researcher John Gilbert – a story in itself that I’ll return to soon. Talking to Nate about the rich history of the Academy’s collection, and why it is important, is a definite bonus.

I asked Nate about how, and why, he adds to the collection.

NATE RICE: We have specimens in the collection that are well over two centuries old. I send those specimens and data from those specimens all over the world to conduct research on everything from the evolution of birds, modern ecological questions and environmental issues.

I also add to the collection. I add about a thousand new specimens to the collection each year. Much of that is done by way of salvaging birds. In North America 100 million birds a year are killed running into windows, wires and cars. I also collect – directly collecting birds – that is, shooting or sacrificing birds from mist nets.

BOB GOSFORD: What about the, in the minds of some, controversial practice of shooting birds in the field for addition to the collection?

NATE RICE: There are a couple issues there. There is a group of people, and I think it is fairly small, that just can’t get over the killing. I shoot birds. I’ll admit that, it is part of my job. There are people out there that just can’t get that their minds around that.

I am as passionate as birds as anybody on the planet. I don’t like to shoot birds. I don’t get off on that. I’m not sadistic in that sense.

I understand the moral of not wanting to shoot things but principally you have to understand that this is for a purpose. As for rare birds, generally speaking, rare, threatened and endangered birds are totally off-limits for collecting. I get them into the museum by way of them hitting windows, being hit by cars and also through zoological gardens – zoos – that have captive breeding programs where birds die. They get sick, the die of old age and that is a great way to get them into the collection.

I will say that some species of birds that are considered rare and endangered, when you look at them on the ground they are actually not. They are more abundant than people think. It is just that they are often in damned inaccessible territory. I’m not against collecting – and I’m talking about surgically collecting – removing one or two individuals from a viable population.

There is an amazing amount of research traction that you get out of those specimen that are immediately used for phylogenetic and population genetic work. The benefit to a species that has a small population of having a few specimens collected far outweighs any potential loss to the genetic structure of that population. That has been proven and I will stand by that to my last breath.

BOB GOSFORD: Why do collections like the Academy’s need so many specimens, using John Gould’s Musk Duck specimens for example, of each species?

NATE RICE: Great question! If we look at a pond of Musk Ducks, they might look similar to us. Obviously the juveniles look different but if we get them in the hand and start measuring them, we get an awful lot of differentiation.

If your look at that pond full of Musk Ducks we see a lot of variation in the depth and tones of the browns and blacks of their plumage, lots of variation on the ground at this time.

But if we went back to the Musk Ducks that John Gould collected and we compare them to what we see from specimens collected today, we will also see variation. Temporal variation over time.

We might see some micro-evolutionary change, some small steps on the evolutionary ladder. And for certain we are going to see ecological change occurring, and that is because bird feathers are great at capturing the historical and environmental conditions at that time.

So we can go back to the Gould Musk Duck specimens and get a glimpse at what the environment was like in Australia in the 1830s. We can see what nutrients were available and in what concentrations. What contaminants were in the environment?

And, if we have done a good job in our collection, and added a couple of specimens every decade or every few decades from certain points on a map we suddenly have a tapestry to look at. For example we can ask what has happened over the last hundred and eighty years. That is one reason why you really need large series of specimens and dozens, even hundreds of specimens collected over centuries.

That material then becomes a very, very powerful research tool. Not just to evolutionary biologists, not just to bird taxonomists – which is historically what bird collections have been used for – but now ecologists, nutrient biologists and people that study global warming.

These traditional museum study specimens are being used for all sorts of things beyond traditional bird taxonomy. And there are Musk Duck specimens in Museums across the globe – it is a world patrimony – a resource for all of us.

BOB GOSFORD: What is the future for collections like that at the Academy?

NATE RICE: Our recent affiliation with Drexel University will open lots of financial and resource doors for us and this year we’ll be adding internationally recognized ornithologists to the staff.

Even in the bad years we’ve always managed to keep and maintain the bird collection at very high research standards. And we’ve always managed to grow the collection, either through salvage work or purchasing collections or direct collecting.

We get our funding from almost across the board. Historically we would get some money from the City of Philadelphia, though that doesn’t happen anymore.

Most of the museum’s funds come from private individuals and almost all of our research grants are Federal grants.

In the US the National Science Foundation funds a lot of that work. The National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control also provide funds and a lot of our field work is underwritten by these centres that are very interested in what’s happening on the influenza and West Nile virus front – these are organisms that can kill people.

That money helps us get into the field. Birds fly – they fly thousands and thousands of miles and whatever is in their lungs and blood goes into the environment.

That is one small part of the story and why collecting and preserving specimens is so important.

You can be anti-collecting, anti-shooting, whatever – we respect that. But please come in and learn how to skin and preserve bird specimens!
They are dead. They ran into a window, got killed by a cat, hit by a car – but they are so important – so why are we going to throw them away? I consider these to be free specimens.

It takes time and it is not easy to prepare a specimen. But it is great fun.

In part two of this interview I’ll talk to Nate Rice about his particular ornithological obsessions – hacking through south-east asian jungles with machetes and going to the end of the road – and beyond.

I’ve written on the subject of Birds & Fire – and their cultural connections – at The Northern Myth here.

I’m excited to announce a call for observations from anyone interested in the behaviour of birds around fire and have today issued the following Media Release calling for comments and observations.

I’ve had a great response to this topic in the past and look forward to your further contributions or suggestions.

I’ll be presenting a paper at the upcoming 36th annual meeting of the Society of Ethnobiology – see more here.

My abstract for that paper follows:

Birds, Fire and Human Culture Australian Landscape

Time: Friday, 17 May 2013 – 11:20am – 11:40am
Author(s):
GOSFORD, Robert – Darwin, Australia. Ethnoornithology Research & Study Group

In this paper I will explore the relationship between birds and fire in the Australian mythical and physical landscape.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that some species – particularly raptors – are active promoters of fire in the northern Australian savannah landscapes, using small fire-sticks and embers to spread fire throughout the open grass and woodlands of the semi-tropical north.

There is also evidence of similar behaviour from other parts of the world, including Africa and the Americas.

I will briefly examine the fire-bird mythology of the Yanyuwa people, an Aboriginal language group from the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory, with a specific example of the propagation of fire on a landscape scale by one species of raptor.

This presentation concludes by speculating on the importance of this line of investigation.

On one hand, “ornithogenic” landscape modification by fire would necessitate a re-evaluation of our knowledge of historic landscape processes.

On the other hand, as an Australasian ‘myth’ states, it opens the possibility of fire manipulation by humans as a behavior learned from kites that could be comparable to weaving learned from spiders, flight based on birds, etc

And this is the media release:

MEDIA RELEASE

ETHNOORNITHOLOGY RESEARCH & STUDY GROUP

BIRDS AND FIRE – A CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECT

A Darwin-based ethno-ornithologist is asking for contributions from members of the public to an exciting new citizen science project that for the first time will examine the relationship between birds and fire in the Australian landscape.

Bob Gosford, moderator at the Ethnoornithology Study and Research Group, wants to hear from people with experiences and observations of birds and fire. “Birds and fire have long been linked in the Australian Aboriginal landscape and there are many accounts of birds – particularly Black Kites – carrying firesticks from the front line of wild-fires to spread those fires,” said Mr Gosford, “Now we are looking for more accounts from members of the public of this behaviour.”

“We think that the upcoming northern fire season will provide many opportunities for people to observe bird behaviour in and around fires. We would welcome any observations of birds carrying firesticks and spreading fires. We are particularly interested for observations from those that know fire best – the volunteer and professional fire-fighters and the many rangers that will spend the next few months fighting fires across the NT.”

“There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that some species – particularly raptors – are active promoters, preservers & users of fire in the Australian landscape,” said Mr Gosford.

“There has long been a belief that fire in the landscape is caused primarily by people and natural forces like lightning. But what if animals other than humans exhibit pyrophilic behavior?”

Next month Mr Gosford will travel to Texas in the USA to present a paper on the relationships between birds and fire in the Australian mythical and physical landscapes. Mr Gosford’s paper “Birds, Fire and Human Culture in the Australian Landscape” will be presented at the Society of Ethnobiology 36th Annual Conference at the University of North Texas.

Mr Gosford welcomes any reports of birds carrying firesticks – or any other interesting behaviour by birds related to fire – and can be contacted by email at birdknowledge@gmail.com

You can see Part One of my conversation with Amadeo Rea at the Denver Botanic Gardens in Colorado in April last year here.

Amadeo Rea is a taxonomic ornithologist and ethnobiologist whose work is focused on the greater Southwest of the USA. His life’s work deals with the taxonomy and distribution of birds, avian paleontology, and zooarchaeology. His 1983 work, Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila, documents avifaunal changes in River Pima country.

Bob Gosford: Tell me about how birds and other animals bring people power through the agency of the Namkam.

Amadeo Rea: Yes, namkam is an important Piman concept. A namkam is a meeter – someone who meets some power animal, a spirit helper some other cultures would call it. I don’t know what the Australian Aboriginal people call it. Its an animal or sometimes a plant (Peyote in particular) that will come to that person in daydreams or real dreams and bring that person spiritual power in the form of songs, dreams, perhaps running skills (racing was very big with the desert people) or gaming or war skills.
But principally the power involved diagnosing illnesses and usually involved songs. So your dream-helper might give you, the namkam, a series of songs that you could use to heal some particular kind of sickness. If Coyote came to you in a dream, you might receive songs to heal Coyote sickness. The shaman diagnoses you “Oh, you have Coyote sickness and you have to find someone who knows the Coyote songs.”

If you are a Coyote namkam then you would have those songs and you would sing them. You don’t have to be a shaman. You are the person who has met with the animal. The shaman may have met that animal – Coyote or Turkey Vulture or whatever – but he may not have. It is an important spiritual concept, this whole thing of power and I think it has some really good parallels. Not knowing Australian Aboriginal culture all that well, but I think it has some good parallels with what you were talking about today in your lecture.

BG: Your book Wings in the Desert shows “an intimate set of relationships between a people and many species of birds, involving hunting, rearing, catching, ceremonial use, internal and external anatomy … .”
I think we sometimes get too fixated on the “ethno” tag and forget that non-indigenous societies also have a lot of knowledge. It may not be as rich or as fine-grained as the kind of knowledge that you have worked with, but it is still there.
I try to impress on people that the important thing is how all peoples and cultures relate to birds. Birds are the most common living thing that we interact with and most people would see and hear them every day. They are the first sounds we wake up to and they are an essential part of the land and soundscapes we live in.
Do you have any thoughts about this place of birds in our lives?

AR: Well, yes, I do. It is a perception of reality. Let me just back up and look at the general for a minute. People in our (western) societies have some big problems with religion and science. There should be no problems between religion and science – if there is any validity in either one of them they should be telling you the same answer.
Some of the theologians are working – the left wing, not fundamentalist creationists – they are saying all windows to reality – all of our knowledge must be seen through these windows and every window that you look out gives a different viewpoint – but the reality is the same outside.
But the culture is … cultures give us a window to reality. Who is ever going to look at birds in the desert the same way as the Pimans looked at that avifauna and metaphorised about it?

BG: That’s the window …

AR: That is the window and that is the reality out there. The Pimans had a unique window – and it is a wonderful window – and it also has some very wonderful folk knowledge and natural history knowledge that we westerners are just starting to find out about.

I love to tell the story about the Poorwill and its hibernation that is embedded into the Piman creation story – you’ve read that in my Wings in The Desert. Until the 1940s, western scientists never dreamed that there actually was a bird that hibernates.

But the Pimans knew about this and they used it as a major metaphor in telling about their conquest of the Gila River area. They also used metaphorically the Verdin, a small desert bird whose nearest relatives are in Africa. The Verdin builds a globular nest and it will even build nests in the wintertime. It will roost in those nests but it goes to bed very early.
Well, in the Piman creation story the Pima were invading the Phoenix basin where a pre-existing people resided. The Pima needed magic help to overcome the residents, a technologically superior people.

So they used the Poorwill Shaman and the Verdun Shaman, that is a Poorwill mankam and a Verdin namkam, to put these people, the enemy, to sleep. So the enemy people went to bed really early and slept very soundly, so it was easy to conquer them, especially if they stayed asleep (laughs).
But who else knew this stuff? The Pimans metaphorised about the natural history, the behaviour of these two bird species.

BG: I was talking to Amazonian researcher Kevin Jernigan earlier today in our session – in Australia we have this wonderful seven volumes of the Handbook of Australian New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, known as the HANZAAB, which is a wonderful reference book that I use all the time.
But for every species there will be huge gaps in the information in the Handbook. Now we don’t know if the Spotted Nightjar hibernates – like the Poorwill in your deserts. I know they disappear for a time each season. Maybe that is a question I have to ask?

AR: Have you ever asked tribal people if they know? They may just say what to them is obvious – “They go in the cracks in the rocks”. The other thing that amazes me is that the folk taxonomic knowledge was universal in these communities – the old people that I worked with – born before or around World War I – knew everyone of these birds. After that, people started spending more time inside the house – particularly women.
And it got to the point that they didn’t know so much. But where I work with the Mountain Pima in Mexico, the people still see these birds. The Mountain Pima are still doing subsistence farming. But it was once universal knowledge.

In our culture “Oh, that is a bird person” or “That is a bird watcher, that is they know the names of things.”
I had some people out to the ranch for Easter. There was a bunch of White-crowned Sparrows and a Scrub Jay eating in my front yard. (That Jay has me trained: as soon as I drive up I am supposed to throw some seed out for it.) Some people looked and said “What is that big blue bird there?” And some wondered about the smaller birds.

I said “What do you think those little brown birds with the white on the head should be called?” So how do we live in southern California with Scrub Jays all over the place and White-crowned Sparrows in every back yard but people don’t know what they are. But with Piman culture, everybody knew everything.
It was just common knowledge, it wasn’t specialised knowledge.

BG: I think that is true with most people who live in an outside world – rather than inside walls. There is an observation that I didn’t get into my talk today. An Australian explorer made an observation about Nightjars, saying “These birds are so common, they are everywhere.”
They are still common today but people don’t put themselves in the place and time when the birds are there and there is an impression that they are rare or decreasing in numbers. That brings me back to the “Well, you never asked” response.

AR: Yes, I’ve had that before – “You never asked” (laughs). You know, indigenous people appreciate someone who is interested in their knowledge – maybe not the young people for whom every thing can be secret and the young people who no longer know and they don’t want anyone else to know.
But the old people – “Oh yeah, you want to talk about birds, we’ll talk about birds.” And in this video I did last evening, I was talking about this Pima man, a cowboy. I went to his house early in the morning and he was frying some eggs.
And he turned off the stove and we started our interview. About ten o’clock I said – “Your eggs are getting cold. Don’y you want to eat them?” And he said “No, we are busy. I’ll eat the eggs later.”

And it got to be noon and he still hadn’t eaten his breakfast.
We were recording and that was what was important to him. Incidentally, I got a new plant name during that time that i didn’t know before. He told me what it was in Spanish and in English and when it grew and said it was s-moik vashai. It was too late to get it into the ethnobotany book, already published at that time. I don’t know when he got to eat his eggs. (laughs)

BG: Another concern I have is that mainstream scientists say that ethnobiology is not science – it is a quite chauvinistic view – and a friend of mine, Nicholas Peterson in Australia wrote a paper many years ago about these views by scientists and he tried to unpack those views – he found that it is repeatable …

AR: and verifiable …

BG: Yes, you can confirm ethnobiological data from other sources and it can be just as rigorous as “western” scientific data.
Often it is based on repeated observations made over time. Just because those observations were not written down or entered into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean they are any less valid. I think it is a lazy and convenient cheap shot to make.

AR: Well, you know this is what is happening in the whole academic world with biological studies.
If you are doing natural history studies, you are not really doing science. And we are teaching that way: we are not educating people to have a real intimate love and knowledge and appreciation for natural history.
Students learn the Krebs cycle and biochemistry and cellular activities and respiration and all that. But they don’t know anything about the environment.

The bottom line is that our society is ignorant – and that ignorance is not being addressed at the University and college level. Where can you go to take a course anymore in just natural history and learn about plants and animals – just the basics?

BG: Some Australian environmental philosophers who talk about the hyperseparation between people and nature – it is way beyond “milk comes from cows not bottles” It is a real problem.

AR: Hyperseparation – I like that …

Amadeo Rea, PhD, is a taxonomic ornithologist and ethnobiologist whose work is focused on the greater Southwest. His papers deal with the taxonomy and distribution of birds, avian paleontology, and zooarchaeology. His 1983 work, Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila, documents avifaunal changes in River Pima country. His work in ethnobiology includes two published volumes on the O’odham, a Southwest Uto-Aztecan group: At the Desert’s Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima, (1997) and Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans, (1998). All three were published by the University of Arizona Press. The third in this series, Wings in the Desert: A Folk Ornithology of Northern Pimans, was published in 2010. Rea is a past president of the Society of Ethnobiology and served as Curator of Birds and Mammals for 13 years at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

In another life I spent quite a few years working as a roadie doing live sound for a bunch of bands across Australia, the UK and Europe.

I started out in Sydney but soon ended up in Melbourne, which in the mid-to-late seventies was where the best live music action was. I ended up working for the wonderful band The Sports – after stints with the Sydney band that I came down with, Uncle Bob’s Band and then Stiletto, a proto-feminist rock band. For whatever reason – most likely not my good looks – I was poached by The Sports to do their live sound. Back in those days live bands worked cruel and punishing schedules – sometimes three gigs a day and often seven days a week. You soon learnt your chops – or got a job in a bank.

The Sports had regular residencies at pubs around town, including at a small upstairs dive called The London Tavern in Caulfield. Lead singer of The Sports, Stephen Cummings, knew some local lads with a band called The Boys Next Door. They were just cutting their teeth in live music, had released a couple of EPs and had the rare distinction of having a song – the excellent Shivers – banned ’cause of references to suicide.

The Boys were as hard-working as any other band around town but struggled to gain much critical attention or audience affection – black-hearted grunge-punk wasn’t very well regarded in those times. They were our on-and-off support act at The London Tavern, and elsewhere around town, for some months and of course in the small but very intense Melbourne music scene you couldn’t avoid other bands playing around town.

The Sports and I went off to the UK – as all good local bands did then – and learnt some very hard lessons. I moved on to a few other bands when I got back and sometime later found myself wandering around London looking for digs and gigs.

(Apologies here for the vagueness of my recollections. Good times and better drugs do tend to cast a veil over one’s memory)

Inevitably I wandered back into touch with the small group of Australian musicians in town, including The Boys Next Door, who had now morphed into The Birthday Party. I’d been working at Stiff Records and had done a few gigs and tours around the UK and Europe but was at a loose end with neither digs nor gigs. London is a great town if you’ve got money and a job but shithouse without. Somehow I ended up sleeping on the floor of the band’s terrace house just off the King’s Road in SW3.

We did quite a few shows around London and the UK and in early November 1981 we set off for Europe in a (very) second-hand British Rail truck to promote the Prayers On Fire album.

By the end of the month we were back in London doing a series of shows culminating in what for mine was a fantastic gig at the Polytechnic of Central London.

Apparently other’s didn’t see that show in the same light and in Ian Johnston’s Bad Seed he says it was the band’s:

” …last concert before returning to Melbourne. The band is in total shambles. Nick attempts to climb the P.A. on numerous occasions and Tracy keeps falling over backwards. Fights erupt on and off stage. Nick beats up a heckler during “She’s Hit” and subsequently forgets the song for which Mick punches him in the mouth. Tracy overdoses before the concert, Nick after.”

The two months of the 1981 – 82 summer tour of Australia was no less chaotic – and fantastic. The band was well pissed off at the fawning affection lavished upon them by sycophantic fans and critics that previously had regarded the band as little better than human pond scum.

Nick describes his inspirations for The Birthday Party lyrics in an essay broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in July 1996 (as published in the book King Ink II):

I soon found the tough prose of the Old Testament a perfect language, at once mysterious and familiar, that not only reflected the state of mind I was in at the time but actively informed my artistic endeavours … it was the feeling I got from the Old Testament, of a pitiful humanity suffering beneath a despotic God, that began to leak into my lyric writing. As a consequence my words blossomed with a nasty, new energy. My band, which was called The Birthday Party, was all heavy bludgeoning rhythms and revved-up, whacked-out guitars and all I had to do was walk on stage and open my mouth and let the curse of God roar through me. Floods, fire and frogs leapt out of my throat.

Though I had no notion of that then, God was talking not just to me but through me, and his breath stank.

Like The Boys Next Door before them, The Birthday Party was falling apart, soon to morph into The Bad Seeds. I ran away (shamefully) to some drug-riddled squat in Rotterdam and then skulked back into Sydney broke as a few months later. The Bad Seeds went on to well-deserved greatness.

Anyway, as Nick might say, I’m getting behind myself. I want to talk about Nick’s birds, of the feathered variety, that he has scattered all a-flutter, through his hundreds of songs.

There is no real reason why I’ve chosen to focus on Nick’s birds rather than the menagerie of other beasts that populate his songs other than my own long-held fascination with them and that Mark Mordue, who is writing a book on Nick’s musical and aristic life, asked me to.

Nick’s use of birds in his writing runs the full spectrum, from pestilent purveyors of gloom and death through to bright winged messengers of love and adoration. You can’t hope for much more than that.

In West Country Girl, a “wretched exercise in flattery” the “birds sing bass” to the Red Right Hand’s “Birds of doom” that hover “with crooked wings cast its wicked shadow” over “Your Funeral, My Trial.”

It is fitting that for a man with the visage and attitude of a corvid that Crows are Nick’s most-referenced avian muse. On The Firstborn Is Dead album Black Crow King pays tribute to that genus.

I like to think that Nick would agree with Henry Ward Beecher‘s view that “If men had wings and bore black feathers, Few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”

I am the black crow king

Keeper of the forgotten corn

The King! The King!

I’m the king of nuthin’ at all

The hammers are a-talking

The nails are a-singing

The thorns are a-crowning him

The spears are a-sailing

The crows are a-mocking

…

The blackbirds have all gone!

Everyone’s rolled on!

I am the black crow king

Keeper of the trodden corn

I am the king

Won’t say it again

And the rain, it raineth daily

Lord

And wash away my clothes

I surrender up my arms

To a company of crows

I am the black crow king

I won’t say it again

Eleven years later the Crows turn up again on the Murder Ballads song Crow Jane.

Crow Jane Crow Jane

Crow Jane

Horrors in her head

That her tongue dare not name

She lives alone by the river

The rolling rivers of pain

Crow Jane Crow Jane

…

Crow Jane Ah hah huh

“O Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson

Why you close up shop so late?”

“Just fitted out a girl who looked like a bird

Measured .32, .44, .38

I asked that girl which road she was taking

Said she was walking the road of hate

But she stopped on a coal-trolley up to New Haven

Population: 48″

Crow Jane Crow Jane

For mine Nick’s take is not quite as chilling as Skip James‘ earlier variation on the theme from his 1966 Blues From The Delta.

Crow Janie, Crow Janie, Crow Jane

Don’t you hold your head high

Someday baby, you know

You got to die

You got to lay down an -

You got to die, you got to -

 

You know, I wanna buy me a pistol

Wants me forty rounds of ball

Shoot Crow Jane, just to see her fall

She got to fall, she got to -

She got to fall, she got to-

…

That’s the reason I begged, Crow Jane

Not to hold her head, too high

Someday baby, you know you got to die

You got to lay down and -

You got to die, you got to -

 

You know, I dug her grave

Eight feet in the ground

Didn’t feel sorry

Until they let her down

A Carrion Crow, with “blood on his chin” looks for a Preacher to forgive his sins in There is a Light on Murder Ballads and in The Carny “a murder of Crows did circle round, First one, then the others flapping blackly down.”

While Murder Ballads has more (six) songs with references to birds, the 2004 Bad Seeds double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is a favourite and takes my cake for quality.

Babe, You Turn Me On - as horny a song as you’ll get from Nick or anyone else – features an Australian bird renowned not only for its beautiful call but for it’s murderous nature.

The butcher bird makes it’s noise
And asks you to agree
With it’s brutal nesting habits
And it’s pointless savagery
Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties

Breathless is another love song in the truest sense.

It’s up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you
And the red-breasted robin beats his wings
His throat it trembles when he sings
For he is helpless before you

The Lyre of Orpheus‘ reference is funny, brief and typically oblique: “This lyre lark is for the birds, said Orpheus, It’s enough to send you bats.”

The sparrows get back-to-back mentions in Abattoir Blues “I wake with the sparrows and hurry off to work” and Nature Boy “And she moves among the sparrows, and she floats upon the breeze … she moves among the sparrows”

And No More Shall We Part’s birds, anonymous but nonetheless a central element of this wistful tale of love gone but still grasped for.

And no more shall we part
All the hatchets have been buried now
And all of birds will sing to your
beautiful heart
Upon the bough

And no more shall we part
Your chain of command
Has been silenced now
And all of those birds
Would’ve sung to your beautiful heart
Anyhow

And of course there is Blue Bird, from my other favourite album, Henry’s Dream.

I got a blue bird

A blue bird on my shoulder

I got a blue bird

A blue bird on my shoulder

 

I sent a warning

A warning of disaster

I sent a warning

I warned of great disaster

 

I sent that blue bird

That blue bird down the water

I sent that blue bird

Floating down the water.

On my first evening of three in Alice Springs I stepped out for a smoke and a look at the sunset. An eruption of hundreds of Little Crows Corvus bennetti, spooked – maybe by a passing Peregrine Falcon, maybe a back-firing truck – rises into a red-velvet sky. I watched as they wheeled and cawed their way about the sky and settled back into their roost trees.

From my own perch I see the Crows in the tops of two large Ghost Gums immediately before me. In the trees to my left and right more.

Up early next morning with coffee and camera in hand I waited for the birds to rise from their slumber and set off for their day. A fat yellow full moon dropped slowly into the west. Sulphorous street lights cast their hepatic glow across the town. Six miles higher, red wingtip lights dragged a veil-grey vapour trail across a black sky.

Thrumming chiller units – it is thirty plus even at this hour – lay like an acoustic blanket over the sleeping town. Rail yards on the edge of town make train-loading-noises. Clanks, thumps and grindings filter into the middle ground on the soft westerly. No Afghans in this town now but in name.

Here an early Pied Butcher Bird throws out a cautious mellifluous call, there the whining me-me-me-me of the Yellow Throated Miner. Above all the Crows, clustered like black grapes in the massive gums, muted sentinels over this mall of misery. The Crows, Black Kings of all they survey give their early grumblings to the day.

Now a small, drawn-out groan, echoed by a creaking-door cackle hither and a full-throated caaarkkk yon.

The Crows tune up in the soft light. “We are just awake, but not ready yet” some say. “Go back to sleep” say others. The inevitable. Silence. A small croooaak. A waaaark. Crack!. Then ten and more giving full voice. Silence. Once more chuurrppp. Kwaaaark – kwaaaak. Much more now of the rattling, raucous corvid morning symphony.

I’ve been watching for the Little Crow Kings of the Alice since I got into town and at the airport spotted a pair raising their bastard Channel-billed Cuckoo parasite at their nest in the centre of the traffic roundabout.

As I sat in meetings my eyes wandered – I have long had no choice in these things – to the singleton Torresian Crows – bigger and all beak than their Little cousins – outside. On the street I lift my head to see those lurking in trees, perched on antennae or pole or floating across the sky on the hot breeze. Were there more Crows in town than usual? Unsure.

That question was answered at dusk that evening as hundreds if not more rose, spooked from their roost trees. A black screaming panic. No mere murder of Crows here but a massacre.

Now in the morning they state their case in full and massed and cracked choir. This town is ours. Soon we will scatter for the day’s business and again lay claim to all that we survey.

We are the Black Crow Kings of Alice Springs.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds made tribute to the birds in the song, Black Crow King on The Firstborn is Dead album:

I am the black crow king

Keeper of the forgotten corn

The King! The King!

I’m the king of nuthin’ at all

The hammers are a-talking

The nails are a-singing

The thorns are a-crowning him

The spears are a-sailing

The crows are a-mocking

The Arrernte traditional owners of Alice Springs, say of the Crows – “Angepe” – that:

Angeper urrperle akurne,

ilwekarle arlkwentye akngerre.”

“The Crow is bad, it hangs around to eat the dead.” *

Now the sun threatens to creep over the eastern hills as the moon slides over the edge of the West McDonnell ranges that split the town.

Something – a slammed door, a shot – startles the birds and hundreds rush into the sky.

No sound other than a thousand long caaaaws and messed panic. A Grey Teal rushes past at arms length – it’s red eye betraying that both of us are as startled as the other.

The Crows settle back to their roosts but the morning and their rest is broken now.

As the sun’s first light kisses the tops of their trees they scatter in twos and threes to all quarters of the town to gather again that evening.

The Black Crow Kings of the Alice.

* From “Thipele arle ileme akerte” “Things that birds let you know about” a series of posters about bird knowledge in four central Australian languages.

I sat down for a yarn with Amadeo Rea at the Denver Botanic Gardens in Colorado in April last year during the 35th Society of Ethnobiology meeting.

Amadeo is a taxonomic ornithologist and ethnobiologist whose work is focused on the greater Southwest of the USA. His life’s work deals with the taxonomy and distribution of birds, avian paleontology, and zooarchaeology. His 1983 work, Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila, documents avifaunal changes in River Pima country.

His work in ethnobiology includes three books on the O’odham, a Southwest Uto-Aztecan language group: At the Desert’s Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima, (1997) and Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans (1998).

One of my favourite ethnoornithological works, Amadeo’s Wings in the Desert: A Folk Ornithology of Northern Pimans was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2007.

Bob Gosford: What started your interest in ethnobiology – why and when?

Amadeo Rea: I went to Arizona right after I got out of college, as soon as I got my Bachelor’s degree. As a kid growing up in northern California I just loved the desert and collected everything I could get in the desert – every Arizona Highways and every Desert Magazine I could find.

When I graduated from college I was in the Franciscan order. I wasn’t planning to continue on, but was still in vows. Our Franciscan province had a multi-tribal Indian school in the Phoenix, Arizona, area, St Johns Indian School. So I said, how about sending me over there for the next few years and teaching in the high school? So thats how it all got started.

As I mentioned in Wings in the Desert, I went there in August of 1963 and soon made friends with lots of people. I was an ornithologist and was already doing ornithological research work as well as teaching in high school. A friend of mine, who was just finishing the manuscript for Birds of Arizona with the University of Arizona Press said “Why don’t you find out from your old Indian friends what the river was like when it ran and what birds were there?” The middle and lower Gila was a dead river – it was dry except after it rained, when a little mud ran through there.

So I started asking Pimas, and I soon began to realize that there was abundant information on all sorts of things that was available from my Pima Indian friends, mostly those who had been born before World War I. So that’s the story so far. I am still transcribing tapes. Most of those people are dead but I have enough tapes to last me for the rest of my life and I am putting them together.

I did an ecological work for my dissertation using Pima data on what used to be there – ethnographic, oral history, mythic narratives and folk taxonomic data.There are the Pima Indians and the Papago indians – they are from the same group and they now call themselves O’odham. The River People are called the Akimel O’odham and the Desert People, without a river, are called Tohono O’odham which means desert people.

BG: So this work started from a suggestion from a mentor that you initially thought, I assume, might occupy a few years of your time …

AR: I was thinking in terms of two years but now it is up to forty-five or six or seven years … (laughs) and I’m not finished yet!

The count – the coffin is the light at the end of the tunnel – unless Alzheimer’s gets me first (laughs). I have three more books that I’m working on and I so want to get those done. So I’ve got to keep it together at least until I get those three done – and then there are some others that I’d like to do but – those three will finish off my Pima work.

For instance, I’ve done the plants, the mammals, I did the birds recently and now I’ve got to do all of the rest of the animals – the rest of the cold-blooded vertebrates and the rest of the invertebrates. And that is going to take a lot of work.

BG: Is there some sort of unifying rationale … something to wrap it all together?

AR: I don’t know if I will do that or if I will let somebody else come along behind me and say what this all means.

BG: So do you have people that you are working with that are coming behind you – that you are mentoring?

AR: Not really. I suppose I was hoping that my books would do that but I was – when I was at the University of San Diego I was in the undergraduate program. We didn’t have a graduate program, so I don’t have any graduate students. I had a Prescott College student – Gary Paul Nabhan –  that I took down to the reservation in the early seventies and he went on. I was on Gary Nabhan’s graduate committee – and Gary has written quite a few more books than I have and he is my “little boy”. (laughs)
BG: For those who are not familiar with ethnobiology, why do you think it is important?>

AR: Well, to me it is important – and there are probably as many answers as people you could ask that question of. To me it is important because you have people who have lived in an environment for centuries, if not millennia, and who have adapted so well and who have such an intimate knowledge. The intimate universal community knowledge of natural history and environment. And how to function in those environments is such a beautiful … a work of art if you are looking at the whole cultural ecosystem.

And much of it has been destroyed post-Conquest. And I come along and am looking at the remnants of this, but for much of it is already too late. It is as if we had destroyed the Mona Lisa or were going to throw it in the garbage. It is something that is beautiful, and efficient and functional and sustainable and now we are finally talking about sustainability. Sustainability has become a part of the vocabulary of Americans and people elsewhere in the world. Well lets look at people who did live a sustainable life …

BG: Because we do not, do we? We can only try in our feeble way. Something has overrun us – and it is us …

AR: Well, as long as you have petroleum we won’t go to sustainability and we won’t have sustainable agriculture as long as we have petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides and can pump water from huge depths in the desert. I don’t know if you have a good water table in Australia?

BG: We have a big artesian basin that covers a large part of the country. But there are problems. We are a dry continent but we do have a lot of sub-surface water.

BG: If you were an emerging or mid-career scientist, what would you look for in ethnobiology – in any one of its many variants and sub-disciplines?

AR: It would be the same reasons. This is a vanishing resource. If I were starting right now I could not write, as I was saying to someone yesterday, if I were to write Desert’s Green Edge today it would probably be ten pages long. The information is not there.

The other books would be much the same. But I’d like to turn that around and say that if I’d started 20 or 30 years earlier … it took me so long to know the right questions to ask. But what richness and depth I could’ve gotten! You know, you can get the names for things – names are just handles to get at the information. Folk taxonomy is wonderful in itself, but where is it going? Taxonomy is the key to open the door to a people’s fund of knowledge, the doorway to their world view.

BG: Is ethnobiology a good discipline for people coming out of undergraduate school looking for a career? 

AR: Yes. You know I have done plenty of taxonomy – at a basic level – and described species and all of that – and there are many people who can do that – but there are not all that many people who can take my data and turn out a book from it.

BG: Wings in the Desert is dedicated to Kenneth E. Hill – who is he?

AR: Kenneth Hill was on the board of Chevron in southern California. He was a bird book collector. Every bird book he could find he would add to his collection. He was also … due to my influence … he was also on the board of the San Diego Natural History Museum, where I was.

At the time that the Museum decided to drop three of their six research departments. My department was one of them – so Birds and Mammals went, Paleontology went, another one went – and Kenneth Hill went to the Acting Director. Who most likely, literally, didn’t know what the word ornithology meant. Kenneth Hill went to him and told him “Dr Rea is working on this book on birds, but first he has to finish this book on the plants and he has a big manuscript on this ready to go to press. “I’ll pay his salary at the museum until he gets that book finished – and the next one.” And the Museum said no.

BG: Oh shit …

AR: They said no. So Kenneth came back to me and he said “You know I have a secretary and I use her about half-time and I am willing – if she is – to help you do all the rest of what’s needed to get this book into publication.” So, when he died, his wife continued to support me. Not a lot. Living on five or six thousand dollars a year it is a bit tight – in southern California. That is the story of Kenneth Hill.

But there are angels out there who realize that this was an important book and it should be done. You would think that the Director of a Museum would know that but he refused the money …

 I’ll continue my discussion with Amadeo Rea here in a few days. Stay tuned for his insights into Piman spirituality and the intertwined lives of birds and people in the southern deserts. 

Thanks to the folks over at Rainforest Journeys  for posting this image and piquing my interest in this most beautiful bird – known as La Tanrrilla to those where it lives in Southern Mexico to northern Bolivia, central Brazil and southern Peru – and as the Sunbittern or Eurypyga helias to the rest of us.

La Tanrrilla is, taxonomically speaking, a rather lonely species. As this page on the Order Eurypygiformes explains that the:

Eurypygiformes is a clade formed by the Kagu, comprising two species in the Rhynochetidae family endemic to New Caledonia, and the Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) from the tropical regions of the Americas … The Eurypygiformes’s affinities are not too well resolved.

They are two families from a Gondwanan lineage of birds.

Suggested by some morphological characteristics they were initially classed as members of the family Ardeidae and later the Gruiformes. 

When seen as a gruiform, the Kagu is generally considered related to the extinct adzebills from New Zealand and the Sunbittern from Central and South America. Recent studies do indicate that the Sunbittern is the closest living relative of the Kagu.

But there is more that is fascinating about La Tanrrilla than it’s obscure lineage. At first glance it is just another beautiful cryptically-plumaged denizen of the thick tropical swamps and jungles where La Tanrrilla stalks slowly on long, bright orange legs, with their snakelike necks and long sharp beaks held low to the ground looking for prey. They seldom fly.

But the real beauty of La Tanrrilla  is only revealed when they are under threat or as part of their elaborate courtship rituals when they spread their glorious wings to reveal a truly magnificent display of colour and light.

Unsurprisingly for a bird of such beauty they are the subject of myth and legend. This is from a wonderful book called Imagenes Del Pariso, in La Reserva Nacional Allpahuayo-Mishana in the Peruvian Amazon. 

La tanrrilla (Eurypyga helias) es una de las aves más carismáticas de las leyendas amazónicas.

Según la creencia popular, del hueso de su pata se elabora una poderosa pusanga (filtro amoroso), que es usada en la selva para atraer a la mujer amada.

El amante debe mirar al objeto de su deseo a través del hueco del delgado hueso, que debe ser preparado cuidadosamente durante un complejo ritual.

The Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) is one of the most charismatic birds from Amazonian legends.

According to popular belief, the leg bones can be made into a powerful pusanga (love filter) that is used in the jungle to attract the beloved female.

The love struck male must look at the object of his desire through the hole of the thin bone, which must be carefully prepared in a complex ritual.

And from this post at Steve Beyer’s blog Singing to the Plants - where he explores all things Ayahuascan and Amazonian - comes this hint that La Tanrrilla is endowed with more than spectacular plumage.

Among mestizos, the pipe stem is preferably made from the thin hollow leg bone of the Tanrrilla, Sunbittern, Eurypyga helias, a wading bird with significant magical properties and, reportedly, a spectacular erection.

I also own a pipe in the indigenous style whose stem is made from a monkey bone; the Yagua make their pipe stems from the bone of a panguana, Tinamou bird, Crypturellus undulatus.

That “spectacular” attribute may explain the significance of La Tanrilla as a source of love magic.

This anecdote is also from the Peruvian Amazon.

According to jungle legend, the bird can help unlucky men attract the woman they desire.

The man will kill the tanrrilla and bury it for several weeks or months until the flesh rots away. He then digs up the bones and takes the long leg bone which is now hollow.

He will then seek out the girl he wants for his “enamorada”, or sweetheart, and he will hide until she is nearby.

He will then take out the leg bone, which acts as his talisman, and he will look at her through the hollow bone. A spell is cast on the girl, and she will suddenly accept his attentions.

If you have any further information about La Tanrilla elsewhere in its range – particularly any information about mythological links or magical properties – I’d welcome your thoughts here.

One of the great pleasures of driving around the American south-west is the variety of raptors – birds of prey – that present themselves as you cruise the big-sky country. Perched on trees and power-poles, soaring high on thermals or just hanging around looking for the dead or dying. They are out there, you’ve just got to use that inquisitive and following eye to find them.

I had a look at one of the most common American raptors, the Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura), back in 2009 here. This week’s bird is the Turkey Vulture’s less common cousin, the Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) and I caught up with this 40 year-old bird – and his 30 year-old female companion – in the back-yard aviary of my friend and respected ethnoornithologist Amadeo Rea from the University of San Diego at his house there a few weeks ago.

You can learn more about Amadeo’s magisterial ethnobiological work with the Piman peoples at the University of Arizona Press page here.

Amadeo has looked after these birds since they were fledglings as part of his long-term research into the relationships between human and birds in the American south and south-west.

Black Vultures rely on sight than smell when searching for food and will often follow a Turkey Vulture towards carrion, where they can gather in large flocks – often of several hundred birds – around a carcass. Black Vultures have stronger beaks than their cousins and can tear up carcasses more easily and will take a wider variety of food, including vegetable and fruits like over-ripe coconuts, pumpkins and oil-palm nuts.

Black Vultures are less than graceful when not in flight. Take-offs and landings can be clumsy, comical affairs and when on the ground they hop like – albeit very large – domestic chooks. Here is how Amadeo described their habits on the ground in his loving examination of the species in The Raptors of Arizona (1998, Richard L. Glinski, Arizona. Game and Fish Dept.):

In contrast to the Turkey Vulture, Black Vultures seem quite content on the ground, often running about in the open where other birds might fly instead. At leisure the Black Vulture walks with a peculiar gait, the rear bouncing with each step. When more hurried the bird “gallops,” with the tail angled up, the head lowered and the body held more horizontally. When moving even faster, especially when chasing another vulture, the bird may extend its wings during the “gallop” before sailing into the air.

…

The anatomy of the Black Vulture has evolved for social feeding at larger carcases. The long legs are poorly adapted for pinning down small rodents or reptiles so that they can be torn up with the bill, a feat at which the Turkey Vulture excels. The Black Vulture, in contrast, is adapted for feeding melees at which the birds thrust, jab and spring about a large carcass. Even when housed in captivity, without competition from other scavengers, a Black Vulture will gobble down its food to repletion in moments.

Black Vultures are economically and culturally important throughout their extensive range of the southern United States, Mexico, Central America and most of South America. Black Vultures are usually locally resident though birds in the cooler northern regions may undertake short sseasonal migrations.

In her valuable essay exploring the extensively documented human – vulture associations, “The Vulture: The Sky and the Earth,” Elizabeth P. Benson says the following of Black Vultures:

The black vulture particularly tends to live close to humans and their waste. Vultures lack feathers around their heads and legs, where they have contact with carrion and feces, so the ultraviolet rays of the sun come down directly on their flesh, discouraging bacteria and parasites. Vultures spread their wings after feeding and the sun disinfects them.

Their digestive system is so remarkable that the ejecta may kill germs. Moreover, vultures make the environment healthy (see Reichel-Dolmatoff 1985, II:132; Salinas Pedraza and Bernard 1978:132).

They turn the vile into something white that glistens in the sun.

In a Chorti Maya narrative, the black vulture is a mason with lime on his apron (Fought 1972:180-181). He boasts that he can make lime and that the white houses in the town look beautiful and he alone has plastered them. Vultures make dark things bright. They are associated not only with death but with transformation of the dead.

…

Vultures have been called masters of two disciplines: soaring and sanitation (Dunne et al. 1988:136). In towns, villages, and rural communities where there is no modern plumbing or garbage disposal, they provide the only sanitation services. “They eat anything, but especially they like the shit,” observed a worker in a slaughterhouse in Guatemala, who also noted that the vultures showed up only on Thursdays and Saturdays, the two days of slaughter (Maslow 1986:200).

Me, I’ll be back in the States in mid-May, eyes cast as ever skyward.

A few weeks ago I spent three days on West Island, one of the Sir Edward Pellew group of islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. I was the guest of the li- Anthawirriyarra Sea Ranger Unit at their annual Mamadthamburu Turtle Camp project, which is itself part of the Yanyuwa Indigenous Protected Area.

On my first day I went for a long wander up Maabayny Beach and crossed the gentlest of paths with an old friend, this Beach Stone-Curlew Esacus magnirostris – or, as they are known in the local Yanyuwa language - a-rabinyi or a-wurrwin. A-rabinyi are one of my favourite wading birds and I occasionally see them around the beaches and cliffs in Darwin, where a pair have bred around East Point for many years.

A-rabinyi are found on open beaches, rocky reefs, in and around mangroves and on sand and mudflats across north Australia coast and north to New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. It is not a common bird and is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

I had my little point-and-shoot with me on my walk so was only able to grab blurry shot as we shared a long stretch of beach and the bird ate what looks to me like a small crab.

The next morning I sat with local Aboriginal landowner for the area, Wylo McKinnon and he told me this short story about a-rabinyi.

A-rabinyi comes from country near Seven Emu station called Kummungu (sp).

There the Moon – barlangarra – asked the bird why it was singing out.

Barlangarra was at a place called Jillali (sp), the balanda name for that place is McQueen – on Robinson River Station.

A-rabinyi had a lot of babies hanging off her. Barlangarra told a-rabinyi that her babies were going to die because she had been telling lies to barlangarra.

Then all of a-rabinyi’s babies died and she went up to the moon, where she is to this day.

I’ll try to flesh this story out in the near future and perhaps see if I can locate a Yanyuwa language version.

The Narnu-Yuwa ki-Wundanyukawu Turtle Project – these words refer to the local Law for Wundunyuka (Sea Turtles) – is a project for the Yanyuwa families for whom everything on land or sea holds, or is a part of, that law.

One of the Yanyuwa senior elders describes the Law in the following terms:

Na-ja narnuyuwa narnu-walkurra barra, wirrimalaru, barni-wardimantha

Barni-ngalngandaya, nakari wabarrangu li-wankala,

li-ngambalanga murimuri

li-ngambalanga ngabuji

li-ngambalanga kardirdi

kalu-kanthaninya na-ja narnu-yuwa,

jiwini awarla, anthaa yurrngumantha barra.

Nyirra-nyngkarriya! Nyirru-linginmaya!

Yurrngumantha. Barni-ndaya winarrku!

This Law is important.

It is powerful, don’t break it,

don’t be ignorant of it,

it is from the past,

from the old people, our mother’s mother’s brothers,

our father’s fathers, our father’s mothers and our mother’s brothers.

They carried this Law, this Law is in the country and the sea for all time.

Listen to it! remember it!

It is for all time.

Do not leave it behind as some kind of rubbish.

You can see just a glimpse of the complexity of the Yanyuwa relationships to their land and sea from this map of the Yanyuwa clan estates.

The Yanyuwa IPA project has received funding through the Australian Government’s Working on Country program, 2007-2013.

Yanyuwa country includes the Sir Edward Pellew Islands and the riverine and coastal areas of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.

The seas around the eight large islands and more then 50 small islets, reefs and rocks of the Sir Edward Pellew Group provide extensive seagrass beds for dugong, turtle and other marine fauna. The mainland islands are home to large numbers of migrating seabirds and shorebirds.

Yanyuwa traditional owners established the li-Anthawirriyarra (people of the sea) Sea Ranger Unit as a means for managing their vast estate. What started out as surveillance and monitoring operation by the Sea Ranger Unit has evolved into a role with longer term land and sea management planning in this remote region. The rangers are employed to monitor and manage heritage sites such as Macassan camps; monitor and manage turtle and dugong populations and survey, map and eradicate feral animals.

I’ll have more on my time at the Mamadthamburu Turtle Camp soon.