Opinion
On Sunday, I found a dead pardalote lying out on the deck beneath the sliding door. He must’ve flown into the glass and broken his neck or mashed his skull. I guess the last thing he saw was a crazy pardalote heading straight for him promising a collision at twice the speed of pardalote, so he veered, but the other pardalote, confoundingly, veered the same way and he crashed head-on into this unrepentant kamikaze, never realising it was himself.
His little body was stiff, but the jewellery of his plumage was unruffled. His yellow throat, the white spangling on his black cap, the rows of polka dots on his dark wings, his caramel belly and his tangerine tail, all these made a display Gustav Fabergé might have envied and emulated. A pardalote’s beauty is so arresting when you see one up close that it briefly annuls all else and makes itself the universe entire. If you’re freshly in love you’ll know this singularity.
Pardalotes are rarely seen, but not rare. They live high in the canopy of the largest gums and their calls rain down incessantly, a characteristic sound of the Australian bush. They are perplexingly loud for such a tiny bird. No audio technician has yet developed a speaker as small that will throw a note so far. This mighty engine of birdsong, this jewel in the crown of antipodean ornithology, weighs six grams. A Christmas beetle might be successfully employed as a bouncer in a pardalote pub.
Ornithologists describe the call variously as: “weep-weeip”, “whee, whee-bee”, “sleep, may-be”, “chnk-whee-a-bee”, “s-wit PIWIP”. A small selection proving the difficulty of describing sounds with language. (Two gunshots written as “bang bang” in English are “ban ban” in Japanese, “pan pan” in French, and “pum pum” in Spanish. The word “bang” only serves as a signifier for a bang because you’ve seen it do so before.)
Pardalotes are spirits, sprites and otherworldly. The morse of their calls proves their existence. Though, after a while, it can become so omnipresent as to be unnoticeable. But when you hear them, crane your neck and look around – you won’t see the source of the song. The bird is so small, so high, it’s almost mythical – one of those creatures you only see when captured, or dead, hauled out of its own world into yours, like a giant squid, a snow leopard, or thylacine. They are way above you in the canopy scouring its vast landscape of leaves, hunting for insects and bingeing on the stool of a bug that shits sugar. Willy Wonka would’ve paid top dollar to any Oompa-Loompa who did that.
When I was a boy we lived by a river, and a pair of pardalotes built a nest low down in a small flowering gum Dad had planted. He was thrilled. He loved his birds, and this nesting was unusual because pardalotes usually dig a tunnel into a sandy bank and nest underground. Dad was very protective of this pair. Day after day he watched them through a typically cheap pair of binoculars that deformed their husbandry and warped their small graces. Looking through Dad’s binos was like consulting a clairvoyant – everything was pretty general. Through them the birds resembled bats in drag. But Dad adored his pardalotes and refused to mow anywhere near their tree for fear of frightening them. Unfortunately, the long grass gave our cat, Spice, the cover it needed to stalk and kill the entire pardalote family.
One privilege the man on death row has that no other person or animal does, is that he knows when he’s eating his last meal and thus savours every morsel. The rest of us are lazily chewing on our final dimmy contemplating next summer’s fun in Spain when we’re suddenly face-down in the soy. Spice thought those pardalotes a soupçon, not a swansong – but they were both. My mother, who used to savage this masthead’s cryptic like a terrier with a rat, is beyond newspapers now. So it can be revealed that Spice didn’t desert us for the sun-drenched ottomans of an old childless couple looking to bestow love and pilchards on some needy thing, as we told her had probably happened. Spice was seen by Dad through the horribly embellished optics of his shoddy binoculars murdering his pardalotes and the cat never got the chance to digest them.
I have laid my pardalote in the pearly mausoleum of a giant clamshell. Why do the calls of his kin sound like a search party today?
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.