“The birds are still yelling and shout at each other, and I don’t mind calling it song”.
- from David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game
The Herbert River coursed leisurely through Yourka Reserve as half-a-dozen nondescript little grey-brown birds flittered about at water’s edge, confidently striking at insects under a high sun. Drying on the warm sand after a swim, I watched them idly from beneath the dappled shade of overhanging paperbarks on a small island in the middle of the narrowly snaking waterway. Yourka—a Bush Heritage property—is nestled amongst the Einasleigh Uplands of Far North Queensland and I sat, knowingly alone, the only human amidst 43,000 hectares, deeply satisfied by the thought that I’d never been so isolated. Taking a “day off” from fieldwork (a survey of raptor nests), I had returned to what I’d found to be both the most idyllic bathing spot and most prolific raptor-spotting site on the reserve.
Thinking I might try to make an ID, I picked up my binoculars and trained them toward the small birds, but as I pulled them into focus a flock of rainbow lorikeets began screeching excitedly, incessantly — alarmingly. There was a rush of many wings amongst branches, and the little grey-brown birds — scrambling — exploded from view. My head snapped back to scan the sky and, barely in time, I caught sight as a great russet-black silhouette slid overhead, far larger and closer than expected, and not ten metres above. An enormous wedge-tailed eagle—a male with a wingspan over two metres—was gliding up the river-way, making slight, appraising tilts of its head.
I sprang to my feet and skipped after it across the sand to the edge of the island, leaning, bending to watch the eagle for as long as possible as it tipped and tilted its wings, steering itself below the canopy and gliding from sight. The bird moved in a deathly silence; a beautifully malevolent, spectral presence. An aural vacuum trailed in its wake, the only sound in the disturbed scene now coming from the water burbling around roots and rocks. My own ecstatic laughter broke the silence. I was elated. A little self-satisfied. Still naked.
