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Bird Diary

Coburg Front Room 7.45am Sun 24th

‘Weh, weh; woh woh woh’

Then again

‘Weh, weh; woh woh woh’

A crow (Corvus mellori) calls loudly. Ambient doves; odd wattlebird; odd car.

Then, faint carolling of magpies down along the Merri. Doves calling to each other, a wattlebird again. All faint, no main players (or singers rather) since the crow.

More than 25 mins later:

Butcherbird whistles it’s lovely tune nearby-

1 2 3 4
123
123
1 2 3 4

123 rise in pitch sequentially and 4 drops.

Plus a dove with it’s slightly gurgling ‘coo’ (‘cuckoo-crroooo-cuck’ in Simpson and Day). It seems like a great effort to make this sound, not the relaxed purr of the common pigeons’ ‘oom’-ing (Columba livia). Almost breathy.

‘Our – ourrr’
‘Our – our – ourrr’
‘Our – our – ourr’

Repeated two or three notes. Higher in pitch than common pigeon. One or two short notes followed by a longer note that drops slightly in pitch.

The sounds of the butcherbird and magpie carolling whistles combine in the street somewhere – not an exchange but an unintentional duet (I think).

Singers:

Little Raven (Corvus mellori)

Spotted Turtle Dove (Streptopelia chinensis)

Red Wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata)

Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen)

Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus)

A useful link for some examples of these birds is:

http://birdsinbackyards.net/


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Bird Diary

Hong Kong Airport Gate 60 8.15am a few days ago

Two unidentified birds land briefly on the supprts of the enclosed walkway between gate and plane. Caught them as smudges on camera as they flew off.


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Some timely visits to retrospectives of John Baldessari (Tate Modern) and Ed Ruscha (Hayward) both West coast Americans of a similar era, both hovering on the boundaries of conceptual art and minimalism, with reference to Dada. The wit in the work is infectious.

Ed Ruscha ‘words as landscape’.

On TV last night ‘Horizon: The secret life of dogs’ and their underrated intelligence by us humans (not unusual). Also Natural World on New Guinea’s incredible birds of paradise.

Which reminded me of Michel de Montaigne (1500s) quoted in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Animal that therefore I am’ (1997):

‘How does he [the human being] know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them?’

Montaigne ‘attributes much to the animal, beginning with a type of language…and [he] recognises in the animal … a capacity to respond’ (Derrida):

‘it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals; for what is it but speech, this faculty we see in them of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting each other to love, as they do by the use of their voice? How could they not speak to one another? They certainly speak to us, and we to them. In how many ways do we not speak to our dogs? And they answer us. We talk to them in another language, with other names, than to birds, hogs, oxen, horses; and we change the idiom according to the species’ (Michel de Montaigne ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’)


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