Community calls: Cries, cackles and carols

Who are you listening to today?

Lately all hell has broken out in my neighbourhood. The culprits are two channel billed cuckoo chicks whose squawks are loud, incessant and unbelievably grating, unlike any other bird I have heard. They are calling for food from their frazzled and deeply duped adoptive parents. In this case a pair of currawongs. Closely related to Australian magpies, currawongs are large intelligent birds, but these cuckoo babies are larger and wilier.

My bird knowledgeable friend Gill is teaching me all about this. “Surely”, I say “the currawongs see that their babies look nothing like them?”. Gill laughs and says she has heard of up to 8 birds rushing food into the ever-open throats of the cuckoos, so effective are their raucous demands. Clearly, I am not the only one disturbed by the need of their cries.

I am aware that I am starting to anthromorphise these cuckoo birds in less than flattering ways. But they are just baby birds doing what Mother Nature has shaped them to do - survive best in the circumstances they find themselves in. The currawongs that feed them are fulfilling their nature too. Life plays on. These last few days only one cuckoo is squawking, its sibling having either flown up north or suffered a terrible fate here in the valley. Yet another mystery to live with.

Meantime I am tuning in more and more to the bird calls around me. Some mornings I wake to the twitter of the noisy miners or the cackle of kookaburras, lately it’s been flocks of little corellas wheeling and squealing. Their arrival in the valley has prompted a counter flashmob of tweeting and peeping rainbow lorikeets whirling down from their feeding tree at the ridge, opposite the corner shop.

There is a particular joy in finding a word that exactly fits something you are currently experiencing. Last week,

Jane Pike

gifted me the word biophony in her beautiful post 36 is Another Word for Hope. I love the way this word rounds my mouth as I practice saying it. Biophony: the sound of life. By definition, biophony is the collective acoustic sounds produced by all living organisms, other than human, that reside in a particular habitat. Increasingly this is where my attention is dwelling.

My favourite calls come from the butcher birds, also a cousin to Australian magpies. Butcher birds are spellbinding songbirds chiming out melodies ranging from 3 note melodies to long carols. I try and imitate them but can never find the pitch or clarity they have. Sometimes their song draws the accompaniment of magpies, enchantment upon enchantment.

If all this is sounding too idyllic let me tell you a bit more about my neighbourhood’s biophony today. The recently arrived rescue dog across the street is howling for its new found mother out at work for the day. In the courtyard beneath where I am writing an old cavoodle with dementia communicates his distress in barks spaced 8 seconds apart, for hours, while in the courtyard on the other side of my study, a young cavoodle whimpers. So many different calls, all yearning for connection.

Animal cries are about what is fundamental to any life: companionship, hunger, wooing, bonding, defending, learning, joy, excitement, danger, death and mourning. My own animal instincts to listen and respond stretch back over millions, or is it billions, of years? In recent years I have started talking out loud to animals, freed from self-consciousness by a mixture of age and grief over what human blindness and deafness to the more than human world has wrought. I hadn’t realised until I started doing this how natural it would feel. Yet each day I see small children calling out to the turtles in our local wetlands to come and say hello to them, which often they do. How is it we encourage this conversation in our young, then remove ourselves from it as a sign of supposed maturity, diminishing our world and consciousness?

My absorption in my neighbourhood’s biophony is changing me. I am not only more attentive to what I am hearing outside my windows, I am also listening more carefully to human calls, in person, online, in my head. Every day I hear sounds of distress and outrage as oligarchs and dictators attack people and places, overturn laws, invade territories, cut off services and attempt to undermine communities. Actions met by cries of shock, grief, compassion, commitment and defiance.

Like many, I monitor how much and what I read or listen to at a time, sensing what opens me up and what shuts me down. One thing I notice is that starting my day by listening to the biophony of my park then practicing tai chi makes a huge difference to how I can bear witness to the news when I do tune in to it. Anchored in my place and body, I open the news holding an awareness of the way communities form through calling to one and other, communicating yearnings, losses and need for connections. Finding ways to stay present together

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

There is intelligence, power and life in flocks. This is why I am gravitating to Substack to get my news and analysis from trusted journalists, scholars and community leaders. Not only because there is more diversity of experience and opinion here but also because I can read and listen in the presence of others. So often, it’s the voices in the comments and notes that help me to process what’s happening in the world, and in myself in response. While my mind reels before the onslaught of what is happening and being revealed, other people’s stories and expressiveness anchor me. I find my bearings in the medley of others’ sobs of sadness, songs of celebration, screams of rage, chants of commitment. And when something resonates, I sing out in response. Dialogue happens. No longer a passive and numb bystander, I join a flock of others questioning, listening, reflecting, caring and acting. Who knows what cry or comment contributes to the flock’s next swirls and swoops, or what movement of the flock might carry me to a place I could never reach by myself?

This morning, I was woken up by a song outside my window, a clear 5 note melody , I had never heard before. I sang it to myself, delighting in the syncopation of its rhythm. Then I rushed outside eager to identify the singer. Only then did I hear the call was coming from a number of different trees and that it was the butcher birds, learning this new (to my ears at least) riff from one another, markedly different to their usual morning chimes. Who knows what brought this change of song on or why it struck me so powerfully this morning? All I know is that it called me out of bed, to marvel at a flock of carolling butcher birds, feeling with them the wonder of this new day, and a yearning to tell you all about it.

So who are you listening to today? What calls are captivating you? What new song do you hear?