For the birds: Autoethnographic entanglements

I begin this chapter in the dying days of a bad year. Specifically, waking too early in the morning in my parents’ home in rural Victoria, the home they are packing up to leave. After more than thirty years by the lake, marooned halfway between two country towns, they have made their choice and are moving into a house in the smaller town. Waking too early in the morning means that I am awake with the birds, woken by the birds here by the lake. The sounds they make at this time of the morning come in waves and layers. My ear seems inadequate for separating trills and chatters, hoops and crawks, whistles and chuffs, clucks and chirps, warbles and quivers, churrs and loops. As light thickens towards another hot, dusty midsummer day, distinct symphonic movements emerge with nuances and variations according to distance from the house or the lake and the tone, depth, and timbre of voices. The bodies of the birds and their locations make possible some sounds and preclude others. The tiny resonating chambers of finch and wren contrast with the steady bellow and whistle of the purple swamphen prancing by the reeds at the water’s edge and birds that sing on the wing as they fly over. Some birds seem to call to and answer others, while some seem to sing to themselves, the sky, the land, the water, and the day. The sounds of the birds are audible because of the silence of humans.