Canowie Brook, Budawang Ranges. |
Sherlock Holmes would not have approved of the dog next door. It started barking into the pre-dawn gloom, just a few nights ago. When looking into the case known as The Hound of the Baskervilles, Mr Holmes was more interested in dogs that did not bark — as am I, come to think of it!
I had a good idea of what had provoked the dog to action, but I had to wait
until last night to confirm it, when, from a deep slumber, I heard a shriek
behind our house.
It was a frightful cry, very hard to describe. The nearest I can get would be to suggest
that it sounds rather like an elderly naked duchess being goosed with ice-cold
tongs. But if it is hard to describe,
the meaning of the noise is crystal clear.
The koels have arrived.
In England, they write to The Times, overjoyed to report the first cuckoo of spring. We Sydneysiders write to the Herald, rather more underjoyed about the
first koel, even though it, too, is a cuckoo.
The name (it rhymes with Noel, as in ‘The First Noel’), reflects the
sound of its call, described in one of my reference books as ‘koo-well’. This description fails to convey the full
flavour and savour of the bird's cry, and so I prefer the goosed duchess. Of course, that might just be because I never
did have much time for duchesses . . .
The koels fly south around the equinox or a few weeks later,
coming down from Papua-New Guinea, the large lizard-shaped island that lies
above the right-hand side of Australia on your maps. Having arrived, they choose territories where
they can exploit the local feathered baby-sitting facilities, just like their
cuckoo relatives in other parts of the world.
Then in the wee small hours of our early spring mornings, around 3.30 or
4 am, they start their calling. This year, they seem to have arrived later than usual.
We really should not blame the koels, for they are simply
staking a claim to a territory, although the resource they care most about is
nesting sites for their target species.
They are too late this year, for the
noisy miners have already hatched their first brood for the year, but there
will be a second sitting, a second chance, later in the year, when high summer
arrives. In a few weeks, the koels will
realise that they need to play a waiting game for a while, and they will
quieten down. Maybe. In the meantime, we will
suffer fitful snoozing from false dawn to sunrise for a few weeks.
In Australian English, there are many different meanings of
‘clock’. It can be variously a
time-piece, an embroidered design on a sock, or a twelve-month prison
sentence. ‘To clock’ can be to give a
punch or a blow, or it can mean to time (a horse or a runner), or it can have
other lesser meanings as well.
Our koels may be Antipodean cuckoos, but nobody in their
right mind would wish to make a koel clock that would bellow each quarter-hour
so unmelodiously. On the other hand,
right now, most of us Antipodeans would relish the prospect of being able to
clock the koels. Hard.
The first Koel here tonight
ReplyDelete1st December in Cooma