This afternoon, when my mother and I opened the door, they landed by our side as they always had, having spotted us from their watching places. Over decades, a family of these little blue-grey birds, had come to stack their hooked meat-eaters’ beaks with mince, which they flew to deliver to young somewhere in our neighbour’s garden, though we had never bothered to try to work out where they lived.

But the bright-eyed butcher birds had the most lovely song of all: a full-throated piping, which I’ve heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute. They had a beautiful, carolling song, with a chorded quality in the falling registers. Lined up on the veranda rail, the magpies cocked their heads to observe me before accepting meat precisely in their blue-white beaks. The lorikeets jumped onto the sloping ramp on both feet, like eager parachutists, to quarrel over the apple and press the juice from the pulp with stubby tongues. The white cockatoos ate daintily, one-legged. As she had when I was a child, she stood behind me in the kitchen with her shoulder propped against the back door, passing slices of apple and small balls of minced meat into my hand.Įach bird, apart from the snatching kookaburras, was touchingly gentle in the way it took food from my fingers. She wasn’t a hugger or giver of advice, so instead we fed the birds. When I experienced a great loss in in my early forties - almost a year to the day after another - I went to see my mother in the family home.

Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud