escort diary® of Jolie: The birds
Every morning, before I have spoken to a single human being, before I have checked my phone or made my morning green tea or remembered what day it is, I go to the balcony and feed the birds.
This is not a casual habit, it's is not something I do when I remember or when the weather is nice or when I feel like being the kind of woman who feeds birds... it's a ritual. It is the first thing I do every single day and it has been for years, and if I tried to explain to you how important it is I would sound unhinged, so instead I am going to describe it and let you decide for yourself.
The currawongs arrive first, to avoid the cackle of the lorikeets and the bullying of the noisy miners. They are enormous, black, aristocrats with feathers, and they have the energy of someone who knows they are the most important person in the room and does not feel the need to prove it. They land on the commode I still haven't refurbished and look at me with an expression I can only describe as professional expectation: not impatient, not rude, but very clearly communicating that we have an arrangement and they are here to collect.
I respect this enormously. There is something about a creature that shows up every single day, at roughly the same time, with a single woop sound if I am not looking, expecting what it was promise), giving something (sticks in nesting season, shiny things when they can, mostly just a superior look), that I find more reliable than most human relationships I've had.
The lorikeets are a different situation entirely.
The lorikeets arrive in a cloud of noise and colour and chaotic energy, like a group of drunk toddlers who have just discovered the buffet. They are beautiful and they are impossible, they scream, they fight each other. they fight me, they knock things over, they hang upside down from the railing for no discernible reason, they fall on their face with an outraged squack as if it's my fault they forgot their wings. They have the attention span of a toddler on sugar and the volume of a construction site and they are, without question, the comic relief of my day.
They reset me. They are so absurdly, aggressively alive that being near them makes the concept of having a bad day feel slightly ridiculous. How can the day be bad? There are tiny rainbow birds screaming at each other on my balcony.
And then there are the noisy miners, who are a different thing entirely. The miners are small and grey and unremarkable-looking in the way that the most interesting people at a party are often unremarkable-looking: you'd walk past them if you weren't paying attention, and then you'd miss everything. They communicate with each other in these tiny peeps, but with everyone else by acting like tiny fighter jets.
They sun themselves in a way that I find almost unbearably endearing. They puff up, fully puffed, round as a fist, every feather standing on end, and they open their beaks and they just sit there, faces tilted up, mouths open, looking like tiny drunk old men who fell asleep on a park bench in the middle of a sentence. They are not hunting, they are not performing... they are just existing, in the sun, with their mouths open, being warm. I aspire to this. I have never once in my life been that relaxed and I am taking notes.
I watch after the fledglings in the three species especially. Every season there are new ones: wobbly, uncertain, still figuring out the relationship between their wings and the concept of landing. They arrive on the balcony like first-time clients: nervous, unsure of the protocol, looking to the adults for cues on how to behave. And the adults are not always kind. That is the thing about nature that people who romanticise it tend to leave out: it is not gentle, it is functional.
The adult birds are not cruel, but they are not interested in making the transition easy.
They are interested in eating.
The fledgling's education is its own problem.
So I intervene. I make sure the small ones eat first. I stand between them and whatever is threatening them... not dramatically, not heroically, just physically, a human body between a baby bird and the thing that is being an ass (it's usually a lorikeet). And the fledgling looks at me with the particular expression of a creature that does not understand what I am but has decided, provisionally, that I am not a threat, and it eats, and I stand there, and the morning continues.
I have thought a lot about why I do this. Not the feeding, the feeding is easy to explain: I love animals, I have a balcony, they come.
But the policing.
The mediation.
The standing between.
The careful, daily management of a tiny ecosystem that would survive perfectly well without me but functions better because I'm there (and the constant cleaning to make sure there's no cross-contamination).
There is a meditative quality to the whole thing that I did not expect when I started and that I now depend on in a way that slightly alarms me. The feeding takes about thirty minutes and during those thirty minutes I am not thinking about anything else.
I am not planning my day, I am not rehearsing conversations, I am not worrying about money or existential threats that are very present right now or the email I should have sent yesterday.
I am watching birds eat.
I am listening to the specific sound a lorikeet makes when it is happy, which is different from the sound it makes when it is angry, which is different from the sound it makes when it is trying to steal food from another lorikeet while pretending it isn't, which is the lorikeet equivalent of whistling casually while your hand is in someone else's bag.
I am watching one of them trip and fall on it's face and laughing.
I am using a dried rose to police the rainbow mafia against the noisy miners who just want to eat.
For thirty minutes every morning, I am not a woman with a complicated life. I am just a body on a balcony, being useful, paying attention, doing a small thing that matters to no one except the creatures it matters to.
And that, the smallness of it, the dailiness of it, the fact that it will never be impressive or important or visible to anyone who isn't standing on my balcony at 7am, is precisely why it works.
The rest of my life is large.
The degrees were large.
The life situation is large.
The work is intimate but it carries weight.
The writing is vast and consuming and never finished.
Everything I do has stakes and consequences and an audience, even if the audience is just me, holding myself to a standard I set so high that I sometimes forget I'm the one who put it there.
But for 30 minutes, on my balcony, before the workout or the writing or the emails and the crushing weight of life, I can watch lorikeets make me laugh and offload their fledglings on me, noisy miners wait for me to intervene so they can eat, and currawongs look at the whole situation in aristocratic disgust.
