“There’s something going on, I could just feel it in the air.” A Bob Dylan song was playing on the car radio as I drove into the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington for a day’s birding.
I could certainly feel something in the air, not the impending drama in the song Lily. Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, more the change in the seasons.
Autumn had arrived but you would never know it by the hot, sultry day. An Indian summer had enveloped southern Tasmania and the birds where aware of it, too. Many of those that should have departed for the mainland on their migratory journeys were hanging in, enjoying the hot weather and its flush of insects and ripe berries and fruits while it lasted.
The senses tricked. Summer lingering when autumn had been firmly in my sights. Not so much seeing it, feeling it, as Dylan would sing.
The stillness in the air, the wan and faded leaves, the odour of dust and grit, bark crumbling from the trunk of trees. A tired landscape awaiting the repair of spring.
A striated pardalote called from a stringybark, and I was taken aback – back to the height of the breeding season between September and January when I usually hear the tune, the song of summer as I call it, along with the descending trill of the fan-tailed cuckoo.
Both species are usually the first to arrive from the mainland – at the end of winter some years – and now it appeared the striated pardalote wanted to be the last to leave. A pardalote singing its “pick-it-up, pick-it-up” song instead of gathering its thoughts around the compass in its head pointed north.
The great trek to the mainland was already in progress, however. On a walk through woodland at Ridgeway I came across small flocks of grey fantails hawking insects in peppermint gums. The fantails, along with other smaller species like the pardalotes and silvereyes, form small flocks for company and safety in number for the flight across Bass Strait and onward.
For me the wonder of migration – how small and fragile birds can undertake such arduous and perilous journeys – is always at the forefront in autumn. In spring they arrive in a flash and the excitement of hunting for them overrides any contemplation of the journey they have made. But in autumn, as I watch the migratory species preparing to leave, I imagine their adventurous flights across forest, field and sea. And I think of the young ones setting off on their first journey with everything they need to know about their route already genetically programmed within them. But they might still need some help from others to find the way.
Such thoughts consume me, amid the crumbling, friable leaf litter, the sense that even as I sit under a hot sun the seasons are a-changin’.