Lockdown, Sat Aug 21st
Looking for certainty encourages fading disappointment. I have abandoned the Christian calendar (pagan anyway) and the first cuckoo of spring, as has most of Britain now. I have lost summer’s death when swallows return to Africa, where we all originated.
It is always light-bright here. Our smaller Welcome Swallows, smaller cousins of the Barn Swallow, without the white undercarriage, stay year-round in Australia, Why leave? (Though many south of here head to the north in winter).
The sea shines and gleams every colours it can, rusty red to greens, antique to aqua, and blues from lullabies to stone, and sometimes black and lead white as a sermon. Sometimes sounding so close the garden becomes a seashore. It’s close enough to see occasional ships pass by and a whale or two.
The forest vibrates beyond superstition, beyond the learning of Gumbaynggirr story. A pair of King Parrots fly into the Tallowwood flowering in the front, poster paint red and green, their sturdy bodies somehow vanish.
My first avian language was duck. Now Black Cockatoos are crying, warning of a change in the weather. You’ll be tired of kangaroos after a year here, someone told me eleven years ago. They made a mistake. We all make so many . . . We face up to being latecomers.
I was going to count the trees surrounding the house, when we moved in there was one the flowering Tallowwood. We are in debt to trees. This pole house depends on giant Tallowwood trunks to stay upright. I guess fifty. Four nests last year and back where I once belonged, my mother is reaching the end.
A tight lockdown, but no panic buying, plenty of mince and toilet paper. I stock up on apples, mandarins and oranges. Lockdown is slow here, half the people in town are maskless. 
We stop by the Nyambaa baga and start with pelicans. Their flight seems both archaic and contemporary, their landing unprofessional, their wings a little on the large size- nitpicking. Pelecanus conspicillatus are the world’s largest pelican, decked in persuasive plumage. 
In a demonstration of animal excitement, a Great Egret dashes back and forth among cormorants diving frequently as she unfolds her slow process, a journey to equilibrium. 
