how can they sleep?

Birds

A cockatoo climbed a pine tree with his scaly beak and claw,
keeping one eye on me,
who watched in awe.

I can’t fathom how people go about their lives,
talk on the phone,
when such creatures inhabit their streets.

I didn’t buy my train ticket to Sydney,
Instead I stood and watched the waves of rainbow lorikeets
festival the sky with their shrieking.

Leisure time should be reserved for this, for watching birds,
Living bunting,
 Colouring in the green,

I wouldn’t get a thing done here,
wouldn’t be able to walk down the street,

How can they sleep? 
How can they take a bath or a coffee in a cafe,
or watch a film and weep ?
How can they do anything pertaining to normal when on the balcony sits,
 a rosella, with vermillion breast, azure wing and inquisitive  beak?

Sasha Norris,  Wentworth Falls, New South Wales, March 2012

Bob the Spider

In Australia, seeing and experiencing wildlife and wild places is my goal. I just want to see the curious and elegant and colourful creatures which are so different to our own. So, it was with some consternation, that among the very first extraordinary creatures I encountered, I was asked to kill.

I was woken from a deep and blissful jet-legged sleep by Becky, my friend of 20 years and travelling companion with a whispered ‘massive spider’ through the funnel of her hands into my ear. Initially, I wasn’t sure of her intentions towards the spider, but her feelings ran very high. My options seemed to be: either take it far, far away, or failing that, dispose of it any way you can. This was in our second holiday home, a cabin in the Blue Mountains. We spent one night in a towering plastic hotel in Darling harbour, Sydney, after which I wanted to be far, far away from the city. Soon  our first day in Australia, we ventured, heavy eyed and disorientated onto a ‘country train’ and into the gorgeous landscape of the Blue Mountains where lyre-birds and koalas dwell and the trees go on forever.

The Banjaree cabins were rustic and homely. Homely enough to be home to 3 and three quarter inch inch long huntsman spider, called for the sake of argument, Bob. As I emerged from the bedroom, Bob was making his way up the wall behind the armchair. The children, were happily playing on the hearth rug. The fire had been lit, by me, earlier, checking each piece of Eucalyptus I brought in from the wood store, carefully for venomous red- back, black-widow or funnel web spiders. I have a sense of the danger of these little arachnids, but Bob, I wasn’t definite about. I thought he was harmless, but wasn’t sure. This seemed the most important to issue for me. Whether Bob could kill us. Many Australian invertebrates are more than capable of causing rapid death. But for Becky, the actual risk from Bob was irrelevant. She was in a state of blind terror, and the children realising something was going on with her quaking in a corner and me standing on a chair staring intently at the wall, were now involved.

Now I was being watched. All their lives, I have taught my children to love, respect and care for wildlife.  Now with Bob crawling ever further up the wall, and Becky urging me to do something before it was too late, I felt in a deep dilemma. I felt a little afraid myself. This was not a spider you could brush under the carpet. This creature was so large, had such a presence, I half expected it to start chatting to me. This was a spider you should invite to dinner. Squashing this spider was a morally significant act. A murder. Not to mention disposing of the body and if splatted, a redecoration of a large area of the living room. I was torn between fascination and horror.

My own feelings about spiders had changed in Autumn 2010. That year, in the UK, there had been an epidemic of Tegeneria, our own large house spider. This was fuelled by a warm, wet summer which had encouraged a glut of insect prey. Then the cold weather drove them inside, and they were everywhere. I had lived in my house for four years then, and I had never killed, hoovered, or even taken a spider outside. I would leave a towel in the bath so they could climb out themselves, but beyond that, If I saw one wandering over my living-room carpet, of an evening, I would let it be.

Autumn 2010 was a turning point, Having tolerated these creatures sharing my space, I was now over run with them. Every morning there were two in my huge, reclaimed, kitchen Belfast sink. Before I put the kid’s to bed at 7pm, they would start to appear. One by the clock, another by the spice rack. Everywhere I looked there they seemed to be black-legged and ominous. I began to feel a little afraid, a bit hemmed in. I found them wrapped up in my woollies, running over my bed, in my boots. Enough was enough. I began to systematically remove them to the barn, glass in one hand, cardboard in the other. I even started taking them to the church in glass jars in the car and releasing them there. To put it technically, I was systematically reducing the breeding population in my home.

Last season, there were far fewer to contend with. I don’t know if my eradication-by-translocation programme worked (which for a conservationist was a genuinely difficult step to take), or if the weather was just unfavourable. Either way I was relieved. Since then, spiders have loomed much larger in my dark thoughts. I had developed a dislike for having them around. And so, my feelings toward Bob were ambivalent. But I couldn’t kill him, because I would only really want to kill an animal that might kill or maim me or my loved ones.

By the time I had gone through these idealogical and intellectual considerations about Bob, he had sensibly crawled well out of reach. I tried throwing a tea towel at him to ground him again, but this sent my audience into a frenzy. Bob was better off hiding in the rafters.

The next morning my little boy woke very early and having always been a natural arachnophobe asked if we could ‘go outside’. Of course the spider risk outside was much higher but these things are irrational. Seizing the opportunity for a night safari, we buckled up our boots and he led the way with the spotlight I had bought from home. We didn’t see a lot in the thick bush, but we heard wallabies thumping a warning of our presence and the menthol smell and cicada song was intoxicating.

On our way back, I saw a lit house in the forest, with children’s toys on the verandah. I knocked on the door, and a fully clothed mum and dad in his boxer shorts appeared. I asked them about the spider. He asked me to indicate the size, which I did. ‘Totally harmless’ he said, suggesting there was a minimum and maximum size for arachnids in this category. ‘There you go Salvi’ I said to my son. The man turned to him, ‘Yeh, no worries mate, that spider will look out for you, kill the nasty insects you don’t want in your house, mossies and the like’.

Back at the ranch, I reflected on my reticence to kill Bob and felt relieved that I had made the right decision. I remarked on what the man had told us. ‘Yeh’, said Salvador, ‘that spider’s on our team’. Since then, we have seen a few of Bob’s friend on our travels, including one so huge it could help you move house given the opportunity.  I also saw a red back, which can cause necrosis if not death, which I carefully lifted outside on a tissue and released into the undergrowth.

Since I have been in Australia, I have reflected on the fact that the convicts we sent here got the last laugh. It may then have been an inhospitable wilderness of blistering heat, three months by sea  from your loved ones, but now with the help of modern technologies but without two thousand years of European environmental destruction, their descendents live in paradise. Today we visited a beach listed in the Guiness Book of Records, for having the world’s whitest sands. Rainbow coloured birds flew down and ate from our hands. The sea is turquoise and rippling with sweet tasting kingfish and pods of dolphins arch in the waves.

In the back of mind though, I am always aware that under that rock, or inside your sock, may be something that could give you a cardiac arrest. Its not just the spiders, its blue-ringed octopus, scorpions, jelly-fish and certain sea snails. Bob and co. have had Becky and I checking our shoes every time we put them on, cowering on our night visits to the loo, wary of picking up objects or sitting on old park benches, just a little jittery the whole time. The UK may be impoverished of wildlife compared to elsewhere, but its boringly, reassuringly safe, and I can’t help agreeing a little bit with Becky about being relieved to get home. And the spiders just aint that big, even if they are on our team. 

  

Sasha x 

The other side of the world

I flew to the other side of the world, the day the first daffodils were opening their heads. I have hesitated to write this sentence, because flying to the other side of the world, is simply unsustainable, and I am not proud of it. For pretty intense personal reasons, I had to come now, and I had just three weeks to complete my trip. If I ever come to the other side of the world again, it will be by sea.

Enough excuses. Leaving England was hard. because Spring was poking its head out of the dark soil and blinking at the sky. And to make it worse, we were having those fresh, glassy, kite-flying days of heaven. After the reticent, delicate snowdrops had suggested rebirth a month before, the daffoldils had in their brazen hundreds, arrived to proclaim it unquestioningly and to blaze a path for the colouring of the earth. Since I have lived in close proximity to Nature  my connections to the seasons very much deeper, I look forward to the coming and going of the camellias, primroses, bluebells, frog chorus, brimstone butterflies, the unfurling ferns, party-coloured Nymphalidae and the gold and orange fall of Autumn.

And the Winters have become easier. When I lived in the city, Winter felt like a spell in a battery chicken farm. My nose was always sore from wiping and my shoulder's hunched. I ran wretched from one overheated inside space to another,. Now the long, protracted cold has its own beauty. The breath of farm animals, the hoare frosts on rosehips, and the redwings coming in to the cotoneaster trees when the fields are solid and inpenetrable to beak.

 Making a fire has become a ritual, bringing redemption from the bitter cold. Every single piece of wood, we chopped and stacked ourselves, a year or more before. This was our precious harvest, making life in the darkest months bearable. I do not mean to Romantise winter in the countryside. I have experienced deep loneliness and fear of the enveloping and abiding darkness. In 2010 I found a buzzard frozen to death,  still clinging to a branch of a tree. Its miserable mate, still alive and waiting in a nearby oak, flew down to warn us not to touch the helpless corpse. Starvation is the bedfellow of wild creatures in winter.But these same natural economics, also send the animals into spring-fever early. Winter doesn't seem so long, because generally, they are up to something before your bank balance has recovered from Christmas.

While we are still in woollies, the blackbird and sparrow begin their mad chatterings and daredevil dashes.in and out of hedgerows, with an urgency known only by creatures who have no central heating or supermarket. Food is available in abundance for such a short spell. They must be in full chick-rearing mode by Mid-April,and long before that territories will be established and marriages secured. They do not wait for the weather, but know by some internal barometer that there is an urgency to the ebbing frosts. In his poem, Spring, Gerard Manley Hopkins put it: 'have, get, before it cloud, before it cloy'. So I came away with a sense of a broken bond, a visceral dislike of the interruption of my observations of the earth moving through its rhythms.

 If I were forced to select my own living hell, it would be to be forever in the transit lounge of some anonymous airport, waiting to board or even worse perhaps, to be on the flight, eating plastic food out of a plastic tray hemmed in on all sides, unable to walk or run or shout or even laugh out loud. This time, however, I had run around so much in the week leading up to my voyage that sitting down for a whole day seemed quite welcome. My children, who have no telly at home, were angelically silent, consuming the colourful moving picture stories meted out to them. Still were grateful to arrive and our legs sang at the sheer joy of movement as we walked to collect our luggage.

I flew to the other side of the world and after twelve hours in Darling Harbour, Sydney, I was on a train to Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, where a cockatoo, with scaly foot and clever beak climbed a pine tree in the car park with one eye on me, and that made it all worth it. So the next few blogs will tell of our antipodean adventures, including the antechinus who went bump in the night (or rather ratatatatatat), but that is another story, of which, more soon.

Love,

Sasha x