Spotted Pardolotes & the Art of Seeing

Hello dear readers, it’s such a privilege to be appearing in your inbox. I’m imagining you popping the kettle on, pouring a tea or coffee and taking your device of choice and steaming mug to a sunny spot to sit for a minute and read about another world outside of lockdown stress and monotony, domestic jobs or zoom calls. Whatever your world is, I hope this place becomes something special that you look forward to in your week.

A dear little Spotted Pardalote Pardalotus punctatus with something for his nest in his mouth. The image is from Wikipedia.

I have a few different tracks I walk. My favourite walk is the long, slow ramble that takes me out over the ridge of bush above the busyness of the sheep yards and sheds. When I head this way the dogs go mad with excitement and twirl around me like horses on a carousel. They know we go for hours and I have no intention to exercise, but rather just wander. Halfway through, when I have lost all 3 dogs, the Corgis on fruitless but magnificent quests to chase down a stag, the Labrador after rabbits, I might sit on a log and let the world resettle around me. I’ve learned to stop and wait for them rather than straining my voice, and ruining the peace (and my mood) by calling them. Once I stop moving the birds appear. It’s usually a bold harem of Superb Blue wrens who make themselves known first, or a Cranky fan - the Grey Fantail - switching his tail back and forth and scolding me for invading his territory. I’ll hear the Pardalotes chiding me from the treetops, but strain to see them.

We have Spotted and Striated Pardalotes here. All the Pardalotes are fast. They don’t fly so much as flash. My bird book describes the Spotted Pardalote as a “diminutive and jewel-like bird”. When I hear their distinctive call, so high and persistent you might think it an insect, I crane my neck searching for them in the trees. Eventually I’ll see them, but it’s always just a glimpse. The dogs return panting hard, the birds perch a little higher, and we walk home.

James loving life despite failing, yet again, to catch that stag on one of our ramble walks.

My other walk/jog track is when I have no time for a ramble. The dogs know I am not taking them because I put on actual runners rather than my faithful Blunnies. This walk is purely utilitarian. It’s an out and back. I get up from my desk, shut the door on the downcast dogs and run up the drive. I cross the highway and head down a quiet road. The bush is thick on either side. I put my ear phones in and say to myself 20 minutes out, 20 minutes back. I walk fast, furiously even. I run down the hills and on the flat bits. I’m thinking about what has to be done when I get home. I’m puffing and blind to the world I’m passing through. One foot in front of the other. How do I solve the knotty problem of the structure of section 3 of my manuscript? It’s a tangle of dead ends. Then, just there, a flash of red and yellow, black cap and spots, a whir of air, I register Pardalote. Where could it have come from? I stop and peer into the bush.

Here’s the thing about Pardalotes, though they love to hang out in the upper storey of eucalypts, they make their nest in a burrow dug into a bank of earth. The entry is the tiniest of holes but at the end of the tunnel they make a domed space built of fine bark strips lined with soft grass. There they lay their eggs.

I’ve never seen a Pardalote nest. I mean I think I’ve seen them, but I’m never sure. I look at holes in earth banks and wonder….could that be a Pardalote nest?

Yesterday, lost in the pound of one foot in front of the other, some part of me had seen him launch from the bank on the edge of the track. There was a hole. A fine layer of sand was freshly dug out of it. A Pardalote nest! I stood for a long while, long enough to blow out my supposedly efficient exercise session. When I finally turned for home I walked with the privilege of sight, with the knowledge I’d seen something I would have missed if not for a sleight of light, if not for all the searching I’ve done for Pardalotes on my other walks.

The glimpse of the Pardalote showed me something I know but forget again and again. No matter how long I sit staring at the screen, the connections will not rise up. It’s only when I stop searching and start seeing that I can follow the trace of the threads in my writing.

Wishing you a Pardalote moment in your week.

MM x

Reading

Sarah Sentilles memoir Stranger Care. I’ve been participating in Sarah’s online writing workshops for a year. They are just wonderful. I highly recommend. Because of this I knew the story behind Stranger Care and I had also seen the burden of grief she carried in writing this book. So it’s taken me a while to pick it up. I did last week. I read it in a day (as everyone else has). It’s extraordinary. The outward casing is a story of fostering a baby. The guts of it is, what it is to want to be a mother, and then what it is to be a mother, and then what it is to lose a child. Cannot recommend highly enough. It’s a beautiful book full of wisdom.

There’s a couple of essays that have stayed with me this week. I’m still thinking about Clare Wright’s essay on visiting a friend in goal. It’s heart breaking, deep and important. The other essay that is humming in my head is Bastian Fox Phelan’s essay in Sydney Review of Books “I know such a hidden pool”. Oh my goodness. Give yourself 20 minutes and read this essay. I wrote in my journal: Rachel Carson. Lockdown. Rockpools. inaturalist. Human connection. Boom pow!

Listening

I re-listened to one of my favourite podcast episodes, Krista Tippett’s 2015 interview with the poet Mary Oliver, Listening to the World. If you need something transporting, wise and beautiful for a lockdown walk, then pop this in your ears.

Writing

Nothing being published this week apart from this newsletter! But thanks to that Pardolote I have unpicked the problem of Section 3 of my manuscript. Now I’ve just got to sew it all back together.

Wishing you small moments of delight in your days. Please share if you can think of someone who might like this missive. Next week will just be for my tribe of paid subscribers. Please join us!

Otherwise there will be another freebie published on September 14 - when we will be in the thick of lambing.

MM