The Avian Edition
Tiffany Tsao • 19 November 2021
When we decided to assemble an avian edition of The Circular, we didn’t anticipate the extent to which it would unlock the editorial bowerbird within. The following assortment of bird-related writing is the result of ambient hunting and selecting, arranging and rearranging over the course of several weeks. Our heartfelt thanks to readers who contributed suggestions to add to the embarrassment of riches! We have tucked some under our wing to share at a later date.
Across these seven pieces, birds prompt contemplation about our place in the larger scheme of things – our relationships with our family members and other inhabitants of the Asia-Pacific region; our connections with other species; our position in relation to the planet, the aeons of history that have preceded us, current climate-change disasters, and the extinction to come.
On Chickens
'One afternoon, Seedy, my white silkie, got watermelon juice in the feathers of her head pouf (not sure if technical term), so I gave her a bath in the laundry trough. I took a photo of her after she’d been shampooed and put it on Instagram. A friend of mine, who is a farmer with hundreds of chooks, sent me a message: "Haha what are you doing??"'
Hooded Plover, Bawley Point
'Every breeding season, the texta-smeared message changes.
Something like:
Eggs laid 1; chicks 1; fledglings 0. Fox predation.
Or:
Eggs: 3; chicks: 2; fledglings: 0. Storm surge.
Or:
Eggs: 3; chicks: 0. Ravens suspected.
Or:
No nesting recorded. Erosion.
One year, they just wrote:
No eggs. Human intervention.'
Endlings
'It’s easy to empathise with an endling when you’re single. I’ve thought a lot about how that parrot must have felt, on the night that it died, curled up in the cool loam, drifting off to sleep. He must have been confused at still being alone, but he would have assumed, as we all do deep in our primitive hindbrains, that his mate would arrive tomorrow.'
A bird flew from the mournful left
'Whenever I see ibises, I wonder whether they are so loathed and ridiculed because they are a daily reminder of these environmental crises and our role in creating them...Every year, about twenty-six million people are displaced by natural disasters, with around twenty-two million of these caused by climate- and weather-related events, a figure expected to increase over the coming decades as climate change exacerbates existing threats like food security, poverty and rapid urbanisation.'
While we were on Twitter
'Two red balloons were extracted from the swollen belly of a grey-headed
albatross | A marine biologist found a barn owl, face in the sand,
next to a half-eaten rat | Not far from Adelaide, an Australian
gannet drowned in a fishing net | A magpie strutted back
and forth on the bitumen beside his flattened mate'
An audio recording of this poem aired on ABC Radio National last week.
On birds – feathered messengers from deep time
'Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate.'
WRITER & WRITER: The future of swans
AZ: What Bella Donna brings with her, and this is a driving force in the book, is swan lore, the extraordinary stories of the swan that play out in so many cultures worldwide. How did all of that emerge?
AW: She has a lot of knowledge of swans, white swans, but there are eight different species of swans in the world. I also wanted her character to show that we are all in the same boat, in a way, and things can happen to any of us, so we should be careful of how we treat one another. In one of his essays, Calvino also quotes Borges saying that there are many men flying in the air and many men on the ground and on the sea, and what happens to them happens to me. And this is true.
Going Down Swinging has made all its past editions (from 1980 onwards) freely available to the public in a digital archive on their website. We think this is very cool and will be poking through in the coming months. You should too!
Many marvellous developments are happening at Liminal. They’ve just launched the Liminal Review of Books, which we are ridiculously excited about. And they recently announced the final results of this year’s Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize. Congratulations to winner Hassan Abul (for ‘Third Cowboy from the Sun’) and to runners up André Dao (‘Five Stele in Commemoration of Forgetting’) and Mykaela Saunders (‘Communing with Uncle Kev’).
Never feel shy about sending your non-fiction-related news to us at editor@thecircular.com.au. And if there are certain works we’ve highlighted that you’ve loved reading, consider subscribing to the publications that published them (if you haven’t already)! Although The Circular does try to aggregate open access writing for its readers, it also supports paying writers and publications for their hard and heartfelt labour.