AN UNKINDNESS OF CROWS

At a poetry performance Susan and I attended as part of the Boorloo Heritage Festival, one of the speakers was Jerome Masamaka originally from Ghana. He talked about the difference between his watery home, built between the sea and a lagoon, and the sandy bush nature of Perth. He also talked about the birds. Flocks and flocks of birds. More than I ever remember as a child.

It was always lovely waking up in the Pink House to the sound of magpies greeting the dawn. And the flash of those glorious lorikeets in the flowering gum tree out the back. 

But I hated the irritating miner/myrnah birds, both imported and local. Every so often one would see a couple of pink and grey galahs nibbling someone's grass or some white cockatoos flitting past. But here the galahs and cockatoos travel in large noisy packs across the sky. The black ones are either Canarby's Black Cockatoo or the beautiful Red-tailed Black Cockatoo and the white ones, mainly Corellas.

Jerome Masamaka talked about having conversations with birds and although I don't do that, I do love seeing them up close as they pause in their day to check you out. One of my favourite Perth photos of birds is from last year when there was a white corella searching for insects in the side mirror of a black car and a black bird doing the same on a white car. 

The main bird song that we hear in Willagee is the bird that I used to call a 'crow'. But it turns out that it's not. There are number of different types and crows and ravens and there isn't much difference between them. Each capital city has only one type so in Melbourne what I saw was a Little Raven but in Perth it's likely to be an Australian Raven.

And while it's a murder of crows it's an unkindness of ravens. And that's how I feel about them with their clunky squawks. I am missing the sound of magpies which often accompanied my early mornings in both the Pink House and Loch St. The tragedy is that whole families of magpies with their glorious carolling are being wiped out with a strange paralysis disease. I can only hope that our clever scientists can save them.