Angry Birds

As a little girl, I remember playing a game, Nature Trail that had arrived as a gift from England. It had something to do with, well, nature. And walking trails. I think there were birds involved.

It clearly wasn’t a gateway drug for me into a lifelong love of birds.

But I’m sat out on the balcony of the National Library, and rather than surrounded by books, I’m surrounded by birds. And I’m ruing the dearth of birding knowledge in my brain. You could say that I’m bird brained on birds.

To my left there is an owl sculpture, perched on a pole. When the actually alive birds get too loud it begins its own bird song and they get thrown off for a second. Only a second. Then it becomes a strange duet.

So far this morning there have been cockatoos (I googled to find out the difference between cockatoos and galahs), a lovely little blue bird and a pair of girls with a similar shaped tail. They’re blue and dainty, so I’m going to go with calling them wrens. The blue is iridescent and beautiful. They have neat little hops. And delicate little tweets. I like them. I say hello when they come to my table.

As opposed to the magpies.

Because there have also been magpies.

A lot of bloody magpies.

To be clear – this is not a diatribe about a football club. If you’d caught me last Saturday night, maybe it would have been. There were an awful lot of Magpies fans taking the parking spaces at the station and jostling in the train. It is both a testament to my lack of interest in organised sport and also this strange fumbling with the mundane that seems to characterise my remergence from two years in lockdown that I failed to remember that Saturday night likely meant a game at the MCG.

I digress.

This little moment is going to be a diatribe about magpies, the birds.

The man sitting at the far end of the balcony had moved his plate to the table behind him – it clearly wasn’t empty as a whole swoop of magpies descended on it. It also, apparently, wasn’t plentiful. Much displeased bickering erupted. Beaks jostled for prime position. Wings flustered. Cacophonous squawks were issued.

But it was at a remove.

Until it wasn’t.

Then it was right in front of me. One of the birds, bless him, had flown into a railing. He sorta knocked himself out. And in that moment of disorientation his two mates, conceivably a little hangry after the lack of crumbs on offer, went him. Held him down with their claws and pecked and cawed and cawed and pecked.

Now, these are magpies. I know they do that swoopy attacky thing. And Hitchcock and birds is also somewhere in my cultural sub-conscious.

I hovered (not like a hummingbird) trying to work out what to do. Stamp my feet loudly (no effect). Tell them to stop it (not just ineffective, but wildly ineffective). While I flapped, they resolved. Flew off to fight another day.

So you can imagine I was disinclined to friendly thoughts towards them when they alighted in front of me as I ate breakfast.

It was, therefore, something of a surprise, when I said to them in a loud and clear voice “you are horribly aggressive, go away”, that they did. And it made me think, if only interventions with racist, homophobic, transphobic and sexist thugs could be that easy.

But then again, simply telling someone or something to go away doesn’t actually resolve their bad behaviour. So the problem remains, requiring careful, calibrated programs that support personal and societal transformations.