Mountain Tails Read Online Free PDF Page A

incessant twittering. Mind you, I did enjoy watching their growing-up at such close quarters that year.
    What with predatory birds like currawongs always hassling and on the lookout for unguarded or fallen babies, it’s a relief to me and the parents when the nestlings are grown. Plus it’s quieter.
    On the first flight, they teeter with shock on the clothesline before discovering the obvious joy of the soaring aerobatics of the adults. I know they have to learn to do it to catch insects on the wing, but those early tries look like pure fun.
    As I write this, the swallow pair have just arrived for the year and are doing large loops across the clearing, in under my verandah roof and out again, sussing out a site. They seem to be favouring my front-door lintel, so I’m deliberately going in and out a lot, to let them know that’s not a good idea. Apart from unwanted droppings from above, on me and the mat, as the weather warms up the door will be open most days and I imagine there’d be a high chance of inadvertent flights into the cabin and an ensuing panic to find the way out again.
    The Scarlet Robin and his pale lady friend also live here for part of the year but they’re an exclusive pair, sufficient unto themselves. I read thatthey have a ‘trilling warble’ but I’m not aware of having heard them speak to each other, let alone to anybody, or anybirdy, else. Since they are such a solitary couple, I hope he’s more affectionate to her in private, as in public he scrupulously preserves a royal distance of several yards between them.
    They appear here in mid summer, to breed I suppose, but where they go afterwards I don’t know. I mainly see them sitting—plumply but separately—on fences or low branches, their round black eyes on the lookout for insects. He’s very notable, with a bright red waistcoat over a white shirt, and a black suit with smart contrasts of white, including a dab on his forehead. Typically, she’s much more demurely dressed, but she does wear a feminine light pink vest under all the brown tones.
    Other small birds seem to have a veritable harem, a flock of consorts. Like the Superb Blue Wren and his dusky tribe of fairy wrens, trilling and flicking in the bare wintry twists of the wisteria vine on my verandah, hopping from one level to another like fat little aerial circus performers, but fast-forwarded, double speed.
    In fact his grey and brown followers are his wife and his children of both sexes, as the young males take a few seasons to mature and develop their bright colours. Meanwhile they stay at home, and, like the kookaburra kids, help with their younger brothers and sisters. Their parents have a sort of open marriage—they remain together for good, but happily have affairs on the side.
    Their flashy father is only temporarily so, for he loses his blue plumage and moults back into asexual brown once the courtship and breeding is done, until next time. Rather like putting on the best suit to get the girl and then relaxing in the favourite baggy tracksuit until the display effort is needed again. But he’s more than just a gaily dressed dandy; he does his fair share of the upbringing and housework as well as home security, and even helps with his ‘illegitimate’ offspring.
    When his grown male children turn blue they will be his competitors and then he is as fierce in his aggression towards them as he is attentivein the fresh annual courtship of his legal lady partner. I assume it’s purely biological, to get her in the mood, but I like the thought that he doesn’t take her for granted even after they’ve been together for a few years. He may offer gifts, usually a yellow petal, to other females, but he still remembers to give one as an anniversary present to his wife.
    The tiniest birds, like the highly acrobatic Yellow Thornbills, get about in big groups, fussing, fluttering, never sitting still for more than