Small wonders
Superb fairy wrens
Portly, brash, they seem small essays in certainty; engage nest-thieves in 'song-battles', send them packing. Otherwise, sweet-voiced, gorgeous.
Splendid fairy wren
Head-on: monocle- sized. His mating costume is purple, cornflower-blue. In eclipse: sober brown, wings tinged with turquoise — a promise.
Lovely fairy wren
He's made a career out of blue; now, songs to guard young, call to confreres, his mate ... valiant ascents laced with fallible pauses.
Variegated fairy wrens
But for upright tail, mauve-blue, matching his, she's plain. With lavender breast, hyacinth head and chestnut epaulettes, he lives in hope.
Zebra finches
Her decor's restful, buff, fawn-grey. He wears neck stripes, spots, rouged ear patches — hints of jungle, and circus. In common: wax-red eyes, beak.
Silvereyes
Plump, precision-built, yet somehow subliminal — movements faster than thought; white-ringed, heart-of-dartboard eyes hypnotise then vanish.
New Holland honeyeaters
inhabit, become jasmine and rosebush, taking just what they need; sing floriated canons; leave in an excitement of wings.
Budgerigars
Faces, sun-yellow; bodies, leaf-green; discreet beaks, small eyes ... they're warmly, dazzlingly, unassuming. Outback flocks rise, block the sun.
Solo
Every feint and nuance that humans know faced with the well-armed onslaughts of others is present in the flight of this small gull: a suavely parried climb becomes a slide sideways down a wind that would douse it in melted pewter — but for the panic-swift save as wings cut a piece of sky, rise clear: a jagged graph of strength reclaimed.
Now it coasts with a confidence won from uncertainty, the wind's power its own. This, the one bird at the estuary, foregrounds miles of ocean when it swoops low: capping tiered green with an abstract flourish, scaling vertiginous whiteness.
Owl
This poem starts in a tree hole where, caught by a cuckoo-camera, fuzzy frights shriek their need. Eyes closed, I see thick night, a barque with sumptuously ribboned sails. Superlatives, a few, must be invoked — the most soundless feathers, the sharpest hearing (those ear-slits, points of a Bermuda triangle). And the eyes? — mortal lamps to hang fables, new omens on; the descending lights of glaukopis, 'the shining-eyed one'. Who does not long, somewhere in themselves, for the embrace of cataclysms of softness; to be met by that startled, eldritch gaze searching the furthest corners of their soul?
Wedge-tailed eagle
Then I saw for the first time over these fields — the sky a padded ceiling, miles of light seeping from the sun's wound — those hypnotic swerves, a mark of dominion like all else: its height,