I was awoken around midnight last night when the insides of my eyelids exploded in electric-purple light, followed almost instantaneously by a tremendous thunderclap that surely put the chooks off the lay for weeks. After leaping out of bed to madly shut doors and windows like preparing a submarine for descending beneath the waves, I spent the next hour delightfully smug that I wasn’t in a tent.
Conditions outside were fast working themselves into a full-blown tempest. As I lay in my comfy dry bed, strobed by the incessant mania of clouds lit up like God’s synapses, I wondered what the experience might be like for a small bird. My first thought was that it wouldn’t be pleasant. Not one bit.
Take the Eastern Spinebill for instance. This rather delicate little creature is Australia’s version of a hummingbird. I could fit ten of them in my tea cup (if I shoved them in a bit). By day, spinebills flit about probing their long curved bills into flower-cups…supping nectar to fuel their tiny metabolic engines.
As evening falls they retreat to a protective sleeping perch in dense foliage and hope like anything they live to see the next dawn.
Last night must have been hell for spinebills. Assaulted by pelting rain, blown ragged by blasting winds they were doubtlessly frightened. Or is this just my anthropomorphic projection?
Certainly birds are capable of experiencing fear. Research with crows confirms they think, plan, innovate, play, mourn and devise cunning solutions for novel problems. Some crows even bring special gifts to people and bellyslide down snow-covered rooftops for fun.
I wanted to open the window and invite in all the rain-soaked birds. I was worried for them. But come morning, the Christmas day sun shone brightly and even before my bleary eyes winked open I could hear the merry song of a great throng of spinebills frolicking in the grevillea outside my bedroom window. It was folly to think they needed me. Go well my feathered friends.