In the Outback

Information:
birds
Australia
desert
herbivores
Quotes about budgies

, to begin with, are budgerigars—birds, yes: in the same class as the penguins, the same family as the parakeets. The natives, in their language, called our species “but-cherry-gah,” meaning “good bird,” as in “good food.” The Aussies, in theirs, dubbed us “budgerigars,” or “budgies” for short. As for us, we don’t say anything, except, “Squawk!”

Ours is the outback—that dry, dusty prairie covering the vast interior of Australia: shadowed in from the east by highlands, bordered up north by rainforests, and circled in elsewhere by fertile, wave-lapped coasts. It's desert country, the whole bit of it: a sun-dried furnace of dirt, strewn in the roughest stretches with only a few dry weeds, and scattered even in the richest oases with nothing more nourishing than grass. Over these lands, drought is so common that you either adapt to it or die. The rains are neither seasonal nor annual but even sparser still—so rare, in fact, that at times they have collapsed into a forgotten legend. I was an old bird, nearly three years old, by the time I first witnessed its drops and thunders, and I have never witnessed them again.

If usually the outback is an arid prairie, then that summer it was a complete wasteland. The drought had stretched far beyond all previous precedent, the rains not having fallen since before my birth. For as long as I could remember, the sun had been scorching, the dry air unrelenting, the desert life dwindling down to only the lucky few. I suppose I can't be sure, exactly, that there hadn't been any rain anywhere in the outback during those three long years. I can only say that not once in all that time had I, personally, seen any rain, and no real evidence thereof. Never once had I felt that crispness in the air which precedes an easterly cold front and then a downpour; only from myths and tales did I know that water could fall down from the sky. We searched the whole outback that summer, the bulk of two thousand miles, and yet it was obvious that we were never anywhere close to rain. We were lucky enough just to find a few distant waterholes, and these, too, were dwindling down to mud. The creek beds had been dry for ages. Brush fires continually erupted from the dry heat. Sometimes we had to rely on dew, and on the moisture inside grass seeds, to get enough water to maintain our lives. By the time of which I speak, the very old, the very young, and the weakest among us had all fallen and died from the immense strain. Those of us who flew on did so with stone-heavy wings, dust-dead senses, and a weakened will to survive. We had foregone breeding not only that summer but also the summer before. Now we worried only about holding ourselves together. Throughout it all, we flapped our wings ahead.

There is this fantastical feeling of flying in a flock, of flapping one's feathers in an infinitude of fellow fowls; of floating in a fat forest of fauna so feather-filled that the photoscape fades from blue to green; of flailing one's feathers in a flock more far-flung than even the most farfetched fantasy—fully unfathomable, in fact, except from far away, and then a formidable flying force . . . but it's not the feeling from afar that I refer to, but from within the flock, folded in by feet upon feet of feathered flappers, of more than fifty thousand fowls; it's the feeling of flapping upward and then falling down, of floating slow and then fluttering fast, of following a flock of fellow followers, a force of flyers fully free, but fraught with famine, fed on by falcons, and forever foraging for water, the foremost lack in a fieldscape frequented by few food-finders apart from our formidable flocks.

She lasted us a month of Sundees, that summer she did, and yet for months we never got even a drop of rain. Way out in the back o' Bourke we were when the hard sun hit—back in the desert, where it's nothing but cracked earth and rotting grass: the lonely grass, the tired grass, which, as we flew on ahead, turned to scrub brush, and then to wattles, and then grew thicker and led us out of the desert, into the big black stump. Around that time we were parched beyond description, and so naturally we tried to choof it to some billabong or waterhole. But when we booked it to all the usual places, we found them dry. We choofed it over to temporary Lake Disappointment, but found it worthy of its name. No use in trying the Percival Lakes. Tobin, Mackay—cactus, every one. By this time it was clear we were in a real predicament—“up in a gumtree,” as they say. So we bolted it out east, real quick-smart, to where the plains rise up into pinnacles and spires, to where, as you gaze out on it from above, you see a whole range of mountains over here, and yet another one over there, and maybe even a third one out on the horizon—not to mention mesas, crags, and cliffsides everywhere—a whole fair-dinkum spectacle to dazzle and delight even the most insensitive yahoo, yes, a true-blue delight. Before long, we reached Uluru—what the white men call Ayers Rock—and yet, although the place was chockablock with tourists, there was little water there, and none of it was free for the taking, and so there was nothing for it but just to bail it on out of there, to just fly south through the Musgraves and then cruise down into the lowlands. There were creek beds galore in this flat country, temporary little channels, a whole mess of them, but they were dry, every one of them. Here, too, we came to the back blocks of human civilization, where certain cockies and farmboys had tried to scrape a bare existence out of the dry dust for his cattle or sheep. But they were pitiful, those farms, and scarcely more healthy than we ourselves, so we had no choice but to flap our way on. Only then, by the most miraculous stroke of luck, did we manage to find it: an oasis in the wilds. It was nothing less, what we encountered, than literally an aqueous plume of water—a genuine fountain, splashing and sloshing across the prairie, where some farmer had dug an artesian well and then let it run. We all fluttered down around this most amazing cornucopia and drenched our beaks in the life-giving nectar until we were plump and rejuvenated. And it was bloody well ironic, too, because a few days later it rained down with a ferocity I've never seen but in dreams.

Only once in my life have I heard the sound of a rainfall—not some smattering of drops, but I mean really a rainfall. In the east it begins with a welcoming sight: a band of white across the sky, which grows gray until it dominates a half of the sky. Thunder rumbles in the distance, then lumbers closer. At first dormant, the sky now transforms. Clouds burst ahead, billowing and rushing like brush-fire smoke, like a cloud of budgies, like a maelstrom in October. Soon the whole sky is gray. The flock flicks its eyes to the atmosphere, staring at those strange sky-tints that curl from white to black, and everybody wonders how long it will take before they produce that monumental, deafening sound . . .
       Tap.
       Was that the first drop, or did I just think I heard . . .
       Tap.
       There it was again, a second . . .
       Tap.
       This time I saw something, a silver shimmering, a shining, sailing to the sand and signaling the start of the shower. And then the drizzle drips on, until soon the drought-dried dirt is drenched with dozens of droplets. Lightning flashes, and its twin thunder crashes. The scene gleams with drop-streams, like lightbeams, slashing the sky into splinters, strips that shine, angling with the wind, from the angry ceiling to the horizon. Before long, indeed, the lightning comes closer, and the thunder blows a blam—BAM!—a slam, booming down loud from a black cloud, whacking a crack through the huge track of the outback. And the rain builds and builds: it slushes upwards to a rushing gush, a downpour, a torrent, swarming over my back, folding my feathers flat, trampling my tufts tight to my back. And it slams in a fat patter—a tap-tapping—splashing and spattering the tan track with a slapping clatter, smashing it; splattering it with a savory juice, a flood from a sky-sluice unloosened, sending the sand a sudden surge, a splurge, down to the sandy land of a new oasis. Within minutes the tap-tapping grows to a rushing roar, a gushing pour, and then it grows still greater: flat-out now the rains drench and douse you—pelting, pecking, and pounding you with such an onslaught of water that the atmosphere turns to surging sea, until finally the sky flickers and fades to black, until at last the air itself gives way to such a tumult, to such a clamor, that you think that you will never see nor hear anything else for as long as you roam the earth, for you believe that this new wet world has transcended all others and displaced them into nonexistence. And the rain will flood the earth. And the water will flood the sky. And the sky will give way to storm clouds and new outpourings. And the outpourings will give birth to new galaxies and new dimensions. And reality will be rain. And existence will be rain. Forever and ever. Amen.

The rest of the story, I am afraid, is not so terribly uplifting, my good mates. I suppose it should have been, as it was a time of prosperity, but as far as the actual events go, I very shortly after that came to the ultimate realization of my life, and it was a bad one. The rains had brought us green grass, red flowers, and even a dinky-di true blue lake. But I was off somewhere chundering. I don't think I'll bother to tell you all the details of that particular interval. Suffice to say, though, that the whole flock flew down to the newly-formed lake—which was positively enormous—and there started to pick out arboreal homes and so on. So I did that myself, too, along with the rest. Suffice to say, as well, that our flock did what it always does during such times of prosperity, and it used the time to stop and mate and raise some chicks. And therefore I, too, went along and did that myself: I found a mate right proper, and soon was bringing her beaks of seeds as fast as she could scarf 'em down, while she, meanwhile, sat and incubated the googs. Suffice to say, however, that all did not go as I'd imagined. Oh, it was splendid, right bonzer, in the very start. The wifey was in full feather; the little chickies cheeped and chattered, happy as old Larry. It was just when they were all grown up into birds, and were ready to fly out for the first time, when everything went awry and bungled me for a spinner. I mean, the little chickies flew off just as pretty as could be, but at the end of it all my wife and I parted company for good. We said our goodbyes, and then I watched her fly out Woop Woop way, dissolve herself in the flock, and vanish into obscurity. I have never seen her since, or if I did, I was never able to distinguish her from the rest.

That's what made me stop and think.
       Who am I? I asked.
       I am a budgerigar, I answered.
       What is a budgerigar? I asked.
       A budgerigar is a bird, I replied.
       What is a bird? I insisted.
       A bird is member of a flock, I responded.
       What kind of flock? I demanded.
       An enormous flock, containing the better part of a million swarming birds. To see it to see a bulging organism. To hear it is to hear a hurricane of heartbeats. To consider such an ungodly huge sum of fowls is enough to make one quake. To try to count them would be impossible. To try to comprehend them all would be a sentence to a madhouse. Together they could carpet the desert green. In tandem they could obliterate the sky. In the skies there has never been anything greater. Over the outback their dominance can never be called into dispute. The budgerigar flock lives because its spirit is indomitable. It flies because it flies, and it will do so forever.
       Fine, that's good, but I want to know about me. Who am I?
       You are a budgerigar.
       Yes, but who in relation to the whole?
       You are bird in a flock. A bird in a flock of hundreds of thousands.
       But there must be something that sets me apart! What's my name, I'm asking you, what's my name?
       You have a name? That's news to me.
       All right—my identity, then. What's my identity?
       An identity. Hmm. I guess it depends on what you mean.
       Something that makes me different, that sets me apart from every other bird in the flock.
       You are—a male bird in the flock.
       Oh, bugger. Am I anything else?
       About three years old—?
       Keep trying, I know you can do better.
       Oh, wait, wait, something. Yes, it's right here, something that sets you apart, sure enough, and makes you different from every other bird.
       Well, come on! What is it?
       You are the bird who is asking all these questions. And more than that you will never know.

I wandered my way through prairies and mountains. I meandered through hillocks and sculptures of stone. At the last minute, I stopped for a drink at a passing roadside stand. I watered my gullet and continued on my way.

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