We are at lookout hoping to see whales on their way back to Antarctica, but the sky has collapsed, pale fur drifts onto grey felt. Instead, we are astonished by a staccato call drawing to piping and whistling. The word joy often accompanies birdsong. An unknown bird, a novelty, a mystery. I whistle encouragement, sounds a little like a Satin Bowerbird without its rough, metallic Tourette’s – Pallid Cuckoo? Little Shrike-thrush? Furtive, movement chanced, dark if not black. I duck from a pair of Little Wattlebirds’ frantic spring chase; a wing grazes my ear.

Imagine the excitement of discovery. Darwin jotted down thoughts on walking through a rainforest: ‘I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest . . . The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind. —if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over . . . it is nearly impossible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings which are excited; wonder, admiration & sublime devotion fill & elevate the mind.’ But discovery is often not immediate. Above a certain size, the find will not be new to the original inhabitants. Are they sure it’s new to science? And then what? If rare, can we conserve it? And what about other species, the many thousands becoming endangered? We are inept at caring. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (1832), RD Keynes, ed., Cambridge UP 2001, p42,59.

Here's Wallace Stevens reading a section of his well-known poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. Ecologist Michael Pocock has a suggestion: ‘A major challenge facing ecologists is effectively communicating the reliance of humanity on nature, so raising the importance of nature in public and political agendas, and thus influencing individuals and decision-makers. Ecological networks provide one potential powerful way to communicate these messages . . . data visualisation is increasingly being used by scientists . . . In most cases, networks are visualised with nodes as polygons (typically circles or rectangles).’ I happily misread Stevens’s circles as polygons. Mind/brain scientist Henry Cowles reminds us: ‘Black birds like ravens and most crows aren’t blackbirds at all . . . the singular ‘a’ of Stevens’s title is clearly misdirection. There are as many birds as there are perspectives, if not more, and as ever, what is true of the poem is true of the world. The more ways we look, the more we realize how much there is to see.’ --------------------------------------------------------- Michael J.O. Pocock et al., The Visualisation of Ecological Networks, and Their Use as a Tool for Engagement, Advocacy and Management’, Advances in Ecological Research 54, January 2016, p43, 54. Henry M. Cowles, ‘What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: On Patrick House’s ‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness’’ Oct 11, 2022. https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/. There are five species of the blackbirds in North America, the Red-winged Blackbird and the Rusty Blackbird are the only two that may be seen in eastern North America. The common blackbird (Turdus merula) is found very occasionally in north America. Stevens could have been referring to a Corvid or a Grackle that migrates from South Eastern USA north in Summer.

Our environment is collapsing; good governance and good government are sporadic. For change, more people in what the International Monetary Fund calls ‘Advanced Economies’, many more, need to care about the planet. One of the best ways is to encourage contact with the natural, and experience its aesthetic richness and sense the interconnected lives we share the planet with. As David Attenborough remarked, ‘No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.’ Birds appear in many of his important poems, but Stevens was not interested in birds as dinosaurs or predators, pollinators, scavengers, seed dispersers and ecosystem engineers. He was born into a wealthy family and became a rich businessman who worked in insurance. John Leornard wrote, ‘Wallace Stevens seems to have been the sort of person who . . . almost didn't allow life to happen to him--at least the kind of life we romantically associate with fine poets. No illegitimacy, drugs, drunkenness, wenching, war, inversion, disease, tragedy or even travel.’ii His family disapproved of the beautiful stenographer he married, and Stevens didn’t speak to his father ever again, but he and his wife and he led separate lives. His life was not happy, he was a depressive and did drink to excess. He liked routine went to the office each day into his seventies. His boss remarked, ‘Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.’iii Stevens was a fan of Mussolini, but his poetry is elliptical, abstract, usually philosophical. Stevens wanted language to transcend the conversational, the local, the immediate, he preferred the world within and imagined reality. He demonstrates no love for nature, unlike Gary Snyder, whose poem ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’, begins, all you can about animals as persons the names of trees and flowers and weeds names of stars, and the movements of the planets and the moon . . .’ And I’d add birds -------------------------------------------------------- John Leonard, ‘Books of The Times’ New York Times, July 22, 1970. Reviewing, Samuel French Morse, Wallace Stevens: poetry as life, ‎Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Insurance Man The life and art of Wallace Stevens’, New Yorker, May 2, 2016. Gary Snyder, Regarding Wave (1967) New Directions, 1970. Ted Hughes also wanted poetry where, ‘The descriptions will be detailed, scientific in their objectivity and microscopic attentiveness.’ Poetry in the Making, Faber and Faber, 1967. Cognitive naturalism supposes that nature appreciation is best illuminated by the natural sciences.

Whirling cloud gathers behind our backs. A Torresian Crow flaps away, one of five native corvids along with the Australian Raven, Forest Raven, Little Raven and Little Crow. Crows are carrion birds sacred to the Celts whose name for them meant 'flesh torn by fighting'. In Scandinavian mythology, crows represent Valkyrie, Goddess of Death. Corvids are usually seen as harbingers of doom, but some cultures view them as messengers from the gods, or tricksters. The Yanyuwa People in the Gulf of Carpentaria tell of the Collared Sparrowhawk (Malarrkarrka, Chicken Hawk) Dreaming belonging to the Wuyaliya clan. He possesses fire. The Crow (a-Wangka) Dreaming belongs to the Mambaliya clan and possesses water. The two argue, Malarrkarrka is thirsty and a-Wangka is tired of raw meat. They fight, a-Wangka steals water and spills it over the land, Malarrkarrka steals fire and scatters it north and south, and now we all have fire and water. Corvids have small ‘bird brains’ but their small neurons are tightly packed. Their 1.5 billion neurons is a similar number to some monkey species, but communication between neurons seems more effective. They recognise themselves in a mirror, recognise human faces, like to play, can solve puzzles and use tools. Their overall intelligence is more like a Great Ape. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Yanyuwa People, Borroloola on the McArthur River, about 50 km upstream from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory. https://www.monash.edu/arts/monash-indigenous-studies/wunungu-awara/animations/the-chicken-hawk-and-the-crow-malrrkarrka-kula-a-wangka

At university I fell inside the poetry collection ‘Crow’. ‘A final try,’ said God. ‘Now, LOVE.’ Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and Man’s bodiless prodigious head Bulbed out onto the earth . . . I read Crow as a bestial hymn, a litany & ritual using the archaic power that language naturally hoards (an originary poetics). This was before I knew the history. Ted Hughes wrote Crow after the self-inflicted deaths of his mistress Assia Wevill and their four-year-old daughter Shura, six years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. He revealed: ‘The idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow would sing. In other words songs with no music whatsoever.’ Hughes was always a visceral poet. After that last tragedy, he retreated to Yorkshire, bred sheep and cattle and wrote about life and death on the farm. ------------------------------------------------------ Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’s First Lesson’, from Crow (1970), Selected Poems 1957-1981, Faber, 1982, p117. E. Faas, 'Ted Hughes's Crow', London Magazine, January 1971, p17. Reprinted in Ted Hughes: the unaccommodated universe, California, Black Sparrow, 1980 Ted Hughes, Moortown, Faber, 1979.

Andrew Motion notes that a judge of a poetry prize in 2005, ‘found ‘three times as many poems about blackbirds - surely the nightingale of our time - as about the war in Iraq or 9/11’. The explanations aren't hard to find. Birds aren't just beautiful and delightful - at once familiar (in the case of the more common species, anyway), and fascinatingly other. They are also ambassadors bearing the bad news about what we have done to the planet.’ I was Sydney Convenor of Poets against the first Gulf war, organised readings, press releases, interviews and helped send 10,000 anti-war poems by Australians to the Prime Minister, John Howard. At the time (and since) I was writing anti-war poems, as well as poems celebrating and investigating the natural. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Motion on Tim Dee, ‘In full flight’, The Guardian, December 10, 2005. The Forward Prize.

The poet John Clare was an expert birder recording scores of species, many of them the first records in his county. In his poem ‘The Blackbird’ he writes, And song in the spring mornings heard As mellow as the flute . . . Clare lived at a time when birdsong filled the fields and valleys or rural England. Rachel Carson observed with deep regret, ‘the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.’ In the breeding season, Blackbird song bursts as a fluting fluid stream, melodic and calm, pure tones with portamento finer than the famous convoluted arpeggios of the Nightingale or its close relative the Song Thrush. Birdsong is two-handed, both a seductive song to attract a mate and a warning to rivals. The song is music, partly improvised and unique to individuals. Calls of rich contrast and variety are valued and some mimicry occurs. My attraction to Melbourne is not merely cultural, but a chance to hear my favourite birdsong, the Eurasian Blackbird, introduced to the city in the 1850s for its song, and now considered a pest. Out of the forests, they have colonised urban parks and gardens the world over. ------------------------------------------------------------ Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962. ‘Voice from Pesticides - DDT - Rachel Carson - Silent Spring’ MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College London. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipbc-6IvMQI

As he was dying of cancer, Henning Mankell, known for the Kurt Wallander novels, listened to Beethoven, Arvo Pärt, Miles, the blues - and Blackbirds. He thought an apt inscription on his gravestone would be, ‘I have heard the blackbird. I have lived.’ At boarding school, I would sing a soothing song: Blackbird singing in the dead of night... ----------------------------------------------------------- Henning Mankell, Quicksand: What It Means to Be a Human Being, (2014) trans., Laurie Thompson, Marlaine Delargy, Random House, 2016. He died in 2015.

For his proposed Guggenheim show of 1971, Hans Haacke tried to teach a mynah (a black Asian Hill Myna, Gracula religiosa) the phrase, ‘All systems go’. Installed in the gallery, the caged bird was meant to repeat the phrase. The bird’s reluctance, or inability, to parrot the phrase cancelled the piece, ‘Norbert: All Systems Go’. Haacke believed art can reveal the interconnections of all systems of any complexity. The show consisted of a three-part investigation into physical, biological, and social systems. The Guggenheim cancelled it because of the last section, in particular a conceptual piece documenting, through charts, maps, diagrams and photographs, the machinations of one of the city’s largest slumlords. Conceptual artists were beginning to engage in institutional critiques, wanting to expand the role of the artist and expose the foundations and framework of the art world, and escape into the real world. He still has considerable influence and much relevance now that activists are investigating museums and galleries for their ethics. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Haake was a member of The Art Worker’s Coalition formed in New York, 1969, concerned about the lack of representation of women artists and artists of colour, as well as the Vietnam war and artists’ rights.

I once made an intervention to draw out creative interconnectivities between a male Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhyncus violaceus) and Homo sapiens. Adult male Satin Bowerbirds wear a wonderfully rich glossy blue-black plumage and stare with unsettling, vibrant violet eyes. Previous studies have examined the complex behaviour of male bowerbirds in building and decorating bowers, and artists have been fascinated by their concern/obsession for objects as aesthetic ‘treasures’.i The 26 letters of the alphabet, cut from blue card, were scattered randomly in the garden of a painter, the late Arthur Boyd, which overlaid the territory of a male Satin Bowerbird. The ‘reading’ of the alphabet by the subject was recorded over a two week period. Each letter corresponded to a a miniature essai (subjects ranging from Consilience to Darwin to Quantum mechanics). This strategy enabled the investigator to display a range of human knowledge in an effort to recognise convergences between the fields of science, history, anthropology and literature, convergences revealed by play and research, poetry and the imagination. From this perspective, the experiment asks why human culture threatens the future of so many other species, including birds, in case the subject ever asks why? At the end of my two week residency over half of the alphabet had been collected to decorate his bower. After I left, Maggie Henton, another Bundanon artist in residence, wrote, ‘You might like to hear about your Bowerbird.  During my last week at Bundanon he decided to move house, abandoning his bower and building another one just across the path.  At first I speculated that perhaps he had found the intellectual challenge of all those alphabet ideas too much, and was longing for a blue plastic toy life. However, over the next few days some of the letters were moved across to his new home, so maybe he was just being more selective in his intellectual interests.’ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the summer of 2008, See short video https://youtu.be/pLVxFd62UNY

Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar is an eccentric man, ravenous for knowledge to establish order in a chaotic world. Listening carefully to a blackbird singing, he whistles, trying to mimic the song. There’s silence then an identical call comes back. Is his whistling accurate and rewarded with a response, or is the delay evidence that his attempt failed to fool the blackbird? Calvino writes, ‘After a while the whistle is repeated - by the same blackbird or by its mate - but always as if this were the first time it had occurred to him to whistle; if this is a dialogue, each remark is uttered after long reflection. But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other? . . . A silence, apparently the same as another silence, could express a hundred different notions; a whistle could too, for that matter; to speak to one another by remaining silent, or by whistling, is always possible; the problem is understanding one another. Or perhaps no one can understand anyone . . .’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Italo Calvino, ‘The Blackbird's Whistle’ (1975) in Mr. Palomar, Harvest Books, International Edition, 1985. It would not be its mate, female Blackbirds do sometimes sing in courtship, but it is a quieter subsong.

This cliff top site is a studio, an art gallery and a concert hall playing the music of place (breakers, birds, sea breeze in the Casuarinas), and takes in all the senses from breathing oceanic air to the kinaesthetic - making the experience so much richer than watching a screen. This environment has changed in just over a hundred years, this was Gumbaynggirr Country, being a prominent feature, a songline site with a Gumbaynggirr name. There was no lookout called Captain Cook’s, and no road up here, and no breakwalls below, changing the river’s meander. Birdsong would have filled the air and the estuary would have floated nawis (bark canoes) used for river crossings, fishing and storytelling. Yaam nganyundi wajaarr. This is my Country, you would have heard. Despite the losses, it remains a wonderful environment, and healthy. Plenty of research finds that being with birds and trees benefits mental and physical health, whereas, social media can damage mental and physical health. The new networked media are energised by a desperate for attention and novelty. We have inherited these appetites, seen in the arts as well as consumer fashion, from 19th century revolutions in manufacturing and consumerism. The latest giant TikTok, a video hosting service, gained over 1 billion monthly active users earlier this year, with 1.8 billion predicted by the end of 2022. TikTok themes in order of popularity are: Entertainment, 535 billion hashtag views; Dance, 181 billion; Pranks, 79 billion; Fitness/sports, 57 billion; Home reno/D.I.Y. 39 billion; Beauty/skincare – 33 billion; Fashion – 27 billion; Recipes/cooking – 18 billion. These are alternative worlds without birdsong. Even this business of writing, trying to tie things together, of making connections is stimulating. Ted Hughes experienced that, ‘special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerised and quite involuntary concentration with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind.’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, Faber and Faber, 1967. https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-stats/ [DL.18.8.2022]Daniel Ruby, ‘TikTok User Statistics (2022): How many TikTok Users Are There?’ August 19, 2022. https://www.demandsage.com/tiktok-user-statistics/ [DL.9.10.2022]