Owls and nightjars and other animals, passing

We have a pair of tawny frogmouths roosting in the jacaranda in our front yard.

Picture David Mayocchi

David, the photographer, had found a few beige and white feathers in the garden late last spring, when the jacaranda was producing a riot of purple flowers, and then, on an evening walk not long after, he saw a tawny frogmouth on a wire, a rare experience in the inner city. On Boxing Day night, coming home late in the car, we nearly ran one over in our driveway.

Tawny frogmouths are masters of disguise. With their branch-coloured feathers and textured plumage, they can look more like part of a tree than a bird. We looked for scat, found gobs of white powdery paste, peppered with insect exoskeleton, on the pathway to the house. Looking up from the scat we found them three at first, high in the tree, perching side-by-side, the smallest likely a fledgling. There was no nest we could see—frogmouths build famously shambolic nests, so perhaps it had already collapsed and we’d missed a whole chapter.

It’s coming up for four months later and they are still with us, the pair anyway. The fledgling has either left its parents, or died. On a walk, we found a ball of what might have been downy feathers, not categorically identifiable as owl. I say owl, knowing that frogmouths are not owls and someone will be sure to correct me. They are nightjars, similar but separate evolution, my volunteer taxonomical editor will point out, in a knowing voice. Well, you say potato (everyone says potato), and I’ll stick with owl, not least because I like the word. If it hoots like an owl, potato.

I have been told by those who know that frogmouths grieve, but I have seen no evidence of our pair’s grieving, and because I am a hopeful person, this makes me hopeful that their fledgling has in fact fledged, moved on to an adult life in the fig up near the war memorial, or further afield, to Mount Coot-tha where a nightjar would be safer from at least one of its predators, the motor car. And perhaps what we saw on our walk was nothing more than a balled-up sock.

I spent last year in Tasmania, working on a novel, in a rented house on a dirt road up a hill past farms to forest. I saw more death than such a quiet place might be expected to yield. I cycled down to the sea most mornings to get in the cold water, and I was often early enough to see the grim reapings of the night drivers, pademelons, devils, kangaroos, and wombats—one of these last that took its final breath as I watched.

There were a dozen or so goats in a paddock halfway down the hill, and once or twice they escaped and charged down the road at speed in front of my bike, heading to a neighbour’s greener pastures, led by an exuberant billy. One day, as I was coming back up the hill, they’d gathered in a tight huddle on top of a mound in their own paddock. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. And then I spied the pair of wedge-tailed eagles, circling the paddock. I looked again and saw that the kids were in the middle of the huddle, the adult goats surrounding them, facing outwards, the billy looking up, horns at the ready. I suppose it’s hardwired in many species.  

I also watched, over several months, an orphaned wombat joey. I hadn’t seen its mother’s body but I knew it was orphaned because it foraged at all the wrong times, on its own. Wombat joeys remain with their mothers for more than a year, and they are not usually more than a few metres apart. On advice from a wildlife carer, and armed with a giant plastic net and a cage, I tried to capture the joey so it could go into care. But it was quick and I was post-injury and slow. After a month of trying, the carer and I decided that since the joey had survived so long, perhaps it would be all right.

Picture David Mayocchi

I don’t know what killed the wombat joey. I found its remains early one morning on my way back up the hill. It had died close to its burrow entry and for some time I could think only of this, that it must have died desperately trying for home, even a home bereft of a mother. I kept expecting to find it again, on the grass, munching, but of course I didn’t, couldn’t, because it was gone.

There was no family to mourn the joey’s passing as far as I was aware, a mercy, I suppose. I stopped at that spot on my ride up the hill for many days, to note that short life and what it had given. At first, I went to a go-to feeling for me, regret. I hadn’t worked hard enough on capture; I hadn’t been vigilant enough. Eventually regret gave way to sadness, and then relief. At least the joey died being a wombat eating grass and feeling the sun and the moon, rather than lived in someone’s house drinking wombat formula from a bottle and learning wombatness from a person.

The spiritual meaning of tawny frogmouths coming into one’s life is camouflage, apparently, teaching us not to give everything away, useful to a novelist, trying to hide the truth of a thing until the end. Their other meaning is nature, reminding us of nature in our lives. I see the tawny frogmouths in the tree most days now. Sometimes, one of them looks down at me, like in the photograph David took. I feel not so much judged as seen.

I have watched them fly off in the early evening on their silent wings. And from my bed, I have heard them call, just before dawn, when they return from their night’s work, checking on one another, perhaps, or reaching for what’s gone.