This week it’s birds, or corellas to be precise.
For the past week or more we have been living through a berserk scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s nightmare vision of the revenge of nature: The Birds.
In the 1963 Hitchock horror-thriller, the residents of Bodega Bay, a small town in California, become the target of a series of unexplained and violent bird attacks.
Things in north Shepparton haven’t turned violent yet, but people are on edge.
I can hear neighbours beating boxes and buckets, thwacking tennis balls and rugs, or just screaming into the surrounding green curtain out of sheer desperation.
Hitchcock’s film is based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story also called The Birds. In du Maurier’s story, England comes under aerial assault from crazed flocks of kamikaze birds, which could be a reminder of World War II when the skies became a thing of dread.
Hitchcock said his birds were punishing humans for taking nature for granted.
I get that.
Apparently corellas are intelligent and long lived, so they could very well be telling us to bugger off and just get out of their space:
“This used to a really nice corella restaurant strip until you lot came along with your concrete blocks and monoculture gardens and European trees.”
They know what’s going on. They pick their screeching times with perfection.
Merrily merrily lolling in bed in the early morning, gently floating down the stream, corellas rudely turf us into the freezing water.
Then, in the late afternoon just as we sink into wine and feet-up time, corellas kick the chair from under us.
In between, they sit out the hot afternoon and the cool night high in the gum canopy just waiting for the light to change. Every few minutes they send out a lone reconnaissance pilot to check conditions.
When things are just right — the light not too bright, the air not too hot, the enemy is sleeping or relaxing — scramble-scramble! — it’s screeching time.
The squadron takes flight in one massive thunderous flap, wheels off towards the light and dive-bombs out of the sun anyone or anything stupid enough to be under its flight path.
The corellas’ screeches are loud enough to make even a stone-deaf old dog sit up and stare skywards.
Flocks of British seagulls probably yell in Monty Python RAF banter about Charlie coppers chucking a handful at Jerry cabbage crates coming over the briny, but Aussie corellas screech in Saturday night pub fighting talk.
“Oi, you come over here and say that ya woke little snowflake, I’m cancelling you right now. Just get outta my face. I’m gonna smash you with your tidy garden and your concrete driveway.”
It’s an avian Twitter pile-on.
I sit on my verandah at the zenith of screeching time and I take in all these taunts and insults, and I wear them like a guilty man suffering judgment in the open court of Gaia.
Sometimes I sit in awe at the burst of orange light on a hundred wings at sunset.
Sometimes I feel my heart race as I duck my head into my neck and cover my ears when a single low screech comes so close it hurts.
Sometimes I wonder at the relentless and deafening push of the world, and I marvel at the arrogance of thinking we can resist.
Sometimes I wish I had a gun.
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