It was nearing dawn, hideously early unless you’re going fishing or leaving the country on dubious political grounds. The colossal din of a gazillion bird voices muscled its way in through the window above my head, filling the room with such manic avian boisterousness that it completely dashed any hope of a sleep-in. So instead I just lay there and listened to the shouting. And they really did seem to me to be shouting rather than singing. Like arguing children striving to be heard over each other, each feathered troubadour seeking to dominate the air space and tell the world how keenly randy and brilliant they are. Or maybe just how stoked they are to have survived another night? Who knows??
This is the “dawn chorus”, a deafening cacophony of territorial claims and disputes, like an army of property lawyers spruiking pre-emptive lawsuits against would-be invaders and sly dandies. The dawn chorus is fuelled by an abundance of cheap nectar and insects, who are in their turn, made entirely from the generous offerings of plants gone wild on the back of a favourable growing season. In that sense then, dawn chorus is simply the calorific conversion of abundant sunlight and rain into song. Beautiful and ancient song.
A song-scape in fact. One that defines not only the upper Bellinger valley, but is so entirely nuanced by the precise mix of species and their relative abundance to each other, that the chorus I hear from my bedroom each morning has no exact equivalence in the known Universe(s). Each of us enjoys a uniquely orchestrated dawn.
Propping my head up with an extra pillow I once more closed my eyes and began focusing on the rather taxing task of un-weaving the audial rainbow. The first thing I noticed was how totally nuts the golden whistlers were, they seemed to be everywhere at once…a topsy turvy world where golden whistlers rule the planet. Oh, if only.
Trying to discern calls behind their acoustic sloganeering I imagined myself like Tony Stark in the movie Iron Man when he palms computer animations around in the air to “see” deeper into the matrix. Except I was doing it with bird song. Delving behind the whistlers I found a plethora of eastern yellow robins, then spinebills, catbirds, lewin’s honeyeaters, thornbills, gerygone, scrubwrens… and all this punctuated by exploding whipbirds.
After a while the dawn chorus slowly ramped down a notch to just being “quite loud”, but finally around 5.30am a party of rambunctious kookaburras chimed in and really did have the last laugh, as everyone had the good sense to realise they were hopelessly outgunned and just gave up after that.