The grey fantails, the males still in striking breeding plumage, came through on a southerly wind, the warm sun at their backs. I watched them spiralling and fluttering, fanning long black-and-white tails which resembled elongated shuttlecocks.
I was a world away from the reality of fantail existence, the birds facing a perilous flight across Bass Strait to escape the Tasmanian winter. A potential peril of a different kind dominated my life: a pandemic, coronavirus, lurked around every corner, as deadly as the sparrowhawk waiting for the fantails before they even reached Bass Strait on their journey north.
Seeking solace amid the fauna and flora of the woods, I knew the human experience would be beyond the avian grasp. The concern of the migrating birds was the autumnal equinox, falling a few days previously. They better get a move on, flying between equal day and night, if they didn’t want to be trapped by approaching winter.
I had found myself in a trap of a different kind, confined to self-isolation during the coronavirus emergency after initially displaying a flippant disregard for health warnings.
Why should I be afraid, even if my son had warned me I was in an advanced age group which made me susceptible to serious illness? I dismissed his concerns.
The seriousness of Covid-19 finally struck home when the café in which I was seated closed on the spot at noon sharp, on March 23rd. I was sent packing, and sent into a realisation that I should finally act appropriately, self-isolate at home and just take short walks, alone, to the nearby Waterworks Reserve.
Denied eateries and bars, I soon realised how much I needed people around me. But my feathered friends helped me to keep sane. And at home, plundering a library of books about birds, I rediscovered, coincidentally, one about isolation. It told of the plight of a group of British prisoners-of-war in Germany during World War II.
Derek Niemann’s Birds in a Cage, Warburg, Germany, 1941 is a true story about young men behind barbed wire who gained comfort and pleasure watching birds and other wildlife. As a POW wrote when it was all over: “One of the chief joys of watching birds in prison was that they inhabited another world than I.”
It was on one of my walks to escape the confines of home that I came across the fantails, about six or seven of them, male and female, feeding in and above a native cherry rich in insect food. They chatted merrily as they chased the flying insects through the tree’s fine lattice leaves, no doubt their innate knowledge telling them the autumnal equinox spelled their insect food would soon die, and there were rich pickings to be had in northern Victoria and New South Wales.
I thought of the soldiers behind barbed wire, and here, nearly 80 years on, the fantails were taking me to that other world.