Landfall – by Megan Coupland
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Thirty minutes north-west of Adelaide is a stretch of South Australian coastline synchronously, gloriously, luminous and bleak. In the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the land, it is Winaityinaityi Pangkara, ‘country belonging to all birds’. And from where I’m standing, not far from its northernmost point, I can see just a fragment: a shoreline so planar and still that it’s difficult to tell where solid ground transitions to water. It’s low tide, a Sunday in late January, and there is no one else in sight. There are the birds though, more numerous than I’d expected given the time of day and the settling heat. I’ve been watching a couple carouse the middle distance, swinging high over the shallows, their wings at full stretch. Others pick through the seagrass remnants that scatter the flats. They’re following the tides, approaching a small gathering of their peers poised to wade: skinny-legged and hesitant, like they’ve rolled up their pant legs on a whim.
This shoreline, skirting the eastern length of the Gulf St Vincent, encompasses the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary National Park. Scores of waterbird and shorebird species make their homes here for the summer, many travelling thousands of kilometres back and forth between the hemispheres each year. I’ve driven past plenty of times. Fifteen years of living in Adelaide has meant regular road trips up this way; it’s the route to both the Yorke and Eyre peninsulas, and, if you continue north, to the Flinders Ranges and beyond. But I’ve never paid much attention to the modest sign at the Dublin turn-off, my mind each time focused instead on passing through Port Wakefield as quickly as possible, where the traffic generally thins and the northern sprawl gives way to deeper stretches of uninterrupted sky.
Today I’ve headed north specifically to see the birds. A month earlier, I found myself at a loose end amidst a run of forty degree days between Christmas and New Year. Picking a book to see it out, I landed on The Natural History of Selborne, a collection of letters set half the world away in a small village in Hampshire, England. Written in the eighteenth century, it has apparently never been out of print. Its author, Gilbert White, is considered one of England’s first ecologists; he happens to be a distant relative on my father’s side and so I grew up with various editions of the book around the house and on the shelves of extended family members. I’d only ever paged indifferently through The Natural History though, not expecting White’s 300-year-old recordings of the minutiae of seasonal change and the to-ings and fro-ings of the fauna of a distant rural district I’d never visited to keep me reading well into the night. But it did once I paused for a time, stilled by the weather, and gave it my full attention.
As the heat eddied and the pace of work and family life progressively picked up through January, I returned time and again to aspects of White’s writing. I found myself thinking increasingly about interconnectedness and, even more so, of its inverse. I bought myself a pair of binoculars, wondering why I’d paid so little attention to the lorikeets that frequent our apricot tree each summer, and how I’d never stopped at Winaityinaityi Pangkara, despite a literary interest in migration and it being on our doorstep. I unboxed the binoculars on our back deck, shifting the central thumbwheel back and forth, playing with the settings and focusing and refocusing while scanning the yard. The slightest movement rendered our suburban block unfamiliar and otherworldly: coiled passionfruit tendrils the weight of mooring line; cavernous fissures erupting tracts of bark. I lingered for some time on the stressed gum over the north-west corner, the largest in the group of three just beyond our fenceline. There were patches of regrowth, frothy clusters that filled the frame in a localised abundance, belying the tree’s condition. But most of the limbs still showed little sign of life and it was even more confronting up close. We’d been concerned it wouldn’t make it through the summer.
Encountering the backyard through binoculars surfaced a memory I hadn’t thought of in decades: of being eight, maybe nine, entranced by a present my teenage sister received for her birthday – a microscope emitting a luminescence I hadn’t previously encountered. It drew me in, moth-like. For months after, I’d steal to her room at every opportunity, taking the box from its shelf to settle on the floor, working with the intensity and efficiency of a safe-cracker. Most days, I’d carefully set the microscope upright, fixing the specimens, one after the other, on the glass. Switching the dials back and forth, I’d watch colour and patterns bloom, vivid and clamorous: pocket-sized fireworks on each slide. Some days though, I’d simply lift the cardboard lid and wonder at the various components of the set without removing them from the box. The cluster of vials and domino rows of slides, the pipettes and coloured dyes all lying suspended in their polystyrene chambers: a universe thrumming with possibility.
How was it that at the age of forty-five, these were the first binoculars I’d thought to buy? I felt like I’d stepped through a wardrobe, nudged open a door behind some coats.
“How was it that at the age of forty-five, these were the first binoculars I’d thought to buy? I felt like I’d stepped through a wardrobe, nudged open a door behind some coats.”
***
And so I’m thinking about doorways, of liminalities, as I step from the car for the first time into the Winaityinaityi Pangkara parking lot. These tidal flats, their low dunes lined with swathes of sea box, are one of the southernmost wintering grounds for migratory shorebirds travelling the East-Asian Australasian Flyway. The birds refuel here, resting for several months following their extraordinary crossing from Siberian and Alaskan breeding grounds. They begin to appear through September each year, when the weather warms and the days gradually lengthen, the mangroves and mudflats providing the resources they need to replenish depleted reserves. By March, around the time of the autumnal equinox, migratory bird numbers on the Australian sites begin to dwindle as, recharged, the birds return to the skies, travelling the flyway to its northernmost points for the breeding season.
When I think of migratory birds, I realise I tend to picture them perpetually sky-high, mid-voyage: absorbed and resolute, steady wings beating in the classic V formation, the world a remote and wavering thing below. It’s possibly not unusual; avian migration has been romanticised and mythologised for as long as humans and birds have coexisted. We’ve observed their comings and goings and drawn meaning, well before we even understood the true nature and scale of the undertaking. Literature through the ages is replete with references of migrating birds as harbingers of new life and the embodiment of hope, as exemplars of fortitude and grit, of grace and freedoms. How little consideration I’ve given to the actualities of the terrestrial landscapes that bookend migration journeys, or the stopovers and staging grounds along the way: the terrain where migratory birds spend the greater portions of their lives.
Wandering the shoreline northwards, I envisage the flyway stretching ahead and over the Pacific: threadwork unfurling to the Arctic, pinheads charting landfall; a composition of safe passage, delicate and fraught.
“Wandering the shoreline northwards, I envisage the flyway stretching ahead and over the Pacific: threadwork unfurling to the Arctic, pinheads charting landfall; a composition of safe passage, delicate and fraught.”
***
It’s only as recently as the twentieth century, with developments in tagging and satellite technologies, that the tracking of an individual bird’s travels through the seasons became possible. For centuries prior, naturalists and observers recorded seasonal disappearances and reappearances, initially uncertain of the birds’ whereabouts when they weren’t in view. A lively avian migration conversation ebbs and flows through time as the field of natural history develops and expands. It builds to a flamboyant reveal: the moment the birds are ultimately unearthed and we know for sure, after centuries of speculation, that they’re not hibernating in the mud at the bottom of ponds, nor transformed seasonally into different species. Technology, following centuries of interest and observation, draws the birds into view with a flourish like a rabbit, by the ears, from a hat.
And yet, is there something in the birds’ journeying back and forth, in our enduring presumptions about their transience and remove, that continue to cloud our thinking about the distinctly human-mediated nature of their reality? Those pinheads charting landfall, unfurling to the Arctic, mark the spaces where migratory shorebirds exist: between water and solid ground, sky and earth, between disparate countries linked by nothing more than a flyway. I can’t help but think how easy it is to get lost in the in-between, invisibility an ever-present danger when you’re neither permanently here nor there. With bird numbers declining and various species arriving at their seasonal destinations later than usual, it would seem that any tendency to presume an existence somehow outside and above our tangible, everyday spaces of concern could see migratory birds slipping away from view again, for good this time, calamitously and unremarked.
If I stop and stand for any length of time on the Winaityinaityi Pangkara flats, my feet sink into the waterlogged shore, the tide having so recently receded. Shifting from one foot to the other, I’m aware of the traffic over the rise and the occasional voice from the row of beach shacks edging the dunes. A short distance away, a shorebird trio ranges the tideline, picking their way across the sand. In a matter of weeks they’ll be gone from this place, moving as they do between land and sky and land again, navigating the intricacies of safe passage in a world not of their making: increasingly delicate, increasingly fraught. ▼
Images: (above) Bar-tailed godwits, by Ben on Flickr
(below) Red-necked stints, by Julie Burgher on Flickr
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