The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (23 page)

Dis-ease

Courageous

Nest: The art of birds

Janine Burke

In 2010 in the Melbourne Museum, I held a nest in my hands for the first time. It was an astonishing and exquisite experience.

The nest itself was delicate and beautiful. However, as an art historian I'm used to the regulations that govern the conservation of precious objects, whether paintings, manuscripts or photographs. The more prestigious the institution and rarer the object, the stricter the rules. I'm not arguing: collections need care. There is an etiquette involved with personally viewing or handling artworks that is rather like being seated at a formal meal. First you enter a clean, hushed, temperature-controlled room. Then a curator indicates where you will sit and offers you a pair of white cotton gloves so your grubby fingers won't stain the artwork. Then a box of treasures is placed before you. Sometimes you are not even allowed to open the lid.

When I visited the Melbourne Museum to see some of the nests, which were not on display, the young woman at the desk said, ‘The nests are in there,' indicating a seminar room off the Discovery Centre. I hovered, waiting to be accompanied, to be given cotton gloves, to be shown where to sit. I had brought my own pencils for making notes. ‘In there,' she said again, firmly but not unkindly. ‘You can stay as long as you like.'

After years of obedience training, I was daunted. What if I wrecked a nest? The seminar room was unremarkable: modern, windowless, with about fifty charcoal-coloured chairs in neat rows. On the desk at the front was a huge cardboard box. I picked it up. It was light. For a moment I thought there'd been a mistake and the box was empty; then I opened it and saw it was full of nests. Each was in a snap-lock plastic bag, the sort you put sandwiches in, with a handwritten catalogue card. I slid the topmost nest out of its bag and into my hands.

The striped honeyeater's nest shimmered with long, soft, beige and tawny-coloured emu feathers, at least one hundred of them. It had been squashed flat from some previous, less commodious form of storage; otherwise it was perfectly preserved. An elaborate piece of work, it looked like an exotic purse worthy of an empress, stitched by a Surrealist seamstress. It was like holding an object that belonged to the wind and it gave the expression ‘feathering your nest' quite a new meaning. Feeling my way into the lip of the nest with my fingertips, I found a dense arrangement of woven grasses. First the honeyeaters had collected the grasses and constructed the nest proper, which hangs like a hammock between the branches of a eucalypt, then they collected the feathers which they deftly slid into the interstices.

The catalogue card informed me that the nest, like many of the others in the box, had been donated by a member of the public, in this case RP Cooper from Milparinka in 1969. Milparinka is in a remote corner of north-western New South Wales, near the tri-borders of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia – truly the Outback. Several parties of our doomed explorers, including Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills, trekked through the country, heading north. In the 1870s, gold was found at nearby Tibooburra, but Milparinka had something more precious in that arid region: a creek with a water hole. I learn from Penny Olsen, one of Australia's leading ornithologists, that
Ray Cooper was an honorary ornithologist at the Melbourne Museum.

Emus, nomadic wanderers, congregate near water holes in the dry season. (Australia's unofficial bird emblem, the emu is a large flightless creature with a tiny head, massive feet and a voluminous feathered coat.) The honeyeaters build their nests in the same period. So the water hole at Milparinka is probably where the honeyeaters gathered the feathers that the emus had shed. Today Milparinka is a ghost town, with a population of less than 300, but emus still wander the land and perhaps the honeyeaters still gather their feathers. Did the honeyeaters use the feathers as camouflage? Emus stand up to two metres tall and honeyeaters sometimes build their nests at around the same height. Emus are big strong birds that can run like the wind and slash with their great claws. A predator, thinking it had glimpsed an emu in the brush, might desist from robbing the nest of eggs or attacking the chicks. On the other hand, Indigenous tribes avidly tracked the emus, seeking out their large eggs and often ambushing them at water holes; around Milparinka that tribe was the Maliangaapa people, who also used the water holes for their ceremonies.

The honeyeaters' nest arrived at the museum in February 1969, midsummer and the end of the breeding season. It means Ray Cooper was a nest thief, as were many of the other donors. After the honeyeaters' endeavours, they returned home to find their home was gone. Ray must have shinnied up a tree, pulled or cut the nest from its moorings and then, carefully and somewhat proudly I imagine, posted it to the museum. The catalogue card notes that the nest is unusual for its large number of feathers. Its beauty lies in its excess. This must be what enticed Cooper who, by stealing it, sought to preserve it. I slide the nest back into its plastic bag, the lustre of my pleasure somewhat dimmed. There's worse to come. The nest of the mudlark, whose official name is the Australian magpie-lark, contains three pink speckled eggs.

During one breeding season, I watched two mudlarks tend their nest in a eucalypt near the Elwood canal. They build, as their name suggests, with mud and plant fibres, on the bare horizontal fork of a tree several metres up. Prior to hatching, the couple took turns to incubate the eggs and afterwards both worked alternate shifts to feed the family. It was a dawn-to-dusk enterprise and the parent scoring the food stayed nearby in case a predator should arrive. Though I cannot know what the mudlark feels or thinks, and evolution teaches that survival is the motivating force, the uncomplaining resolve of animals is impressive, stoic and dignified. The mudlark is a quirky bird with the bold presence of its larger relative, the magpie. If I pass a mudlark when out walking along the Elwood Canal, it often won't bother to move but cocks me a sideways glance, self-contained and unafraid, with its very pale blue eyes, before continuing to forage.
It's my place too.

In the museum, I take the mudlark's nest in my hands. The donor had thoughtfully included its foundation – a sawn-off branch. I'm surprised at how heavy it is: it must weigh around one kilo. Without a date on the catalogue card I've no clue to its age but it's rock solid and strong, without a crack, as sturdy as an ancient wall built by those other great engineers, the Romans.

Holding a nest allows you to share the bird's intimate domestic space. While the exterior of the mudlark's nest is tough, inside it's cosy and layered with grasses. The white-plumed honeyeater makes a tiny nest like a cradle, quite deep, woven with cobwebs stolen from spiders, and insulated with strands of clean white wool. The circular shape of nests is determined by their friction-built foundation – twig upon twig – or, in the case of plant fibres and mud, the shaping of moist material that dries hard. Birds don't only use their beaks to build: they press their breasts against the inner wall to make it round, imprinting their shape on their home, an interior formed by the steady rhythm of their beating hearts.

In 2010, a contemporary art exhibition in Melbourne celebrated birds. Christian Froelich, a young sculptor, made a work imitating a nest that was woven with twigs and rose brambles. Positioned aloft at the rear of the gallery, it was an arresting homage, monumental yet fragile. In a media interview, Froelich explained the difficulties of constructing the nest and how long it had taken. What if a mudlark and a magpie were invited to the gallery to assess the human's handiwork? The artist had the privilege of working at his own pace with two hands in a studio out of the weather. For birds, time is of the essence and their projects take place in nature, whatever the conditions. The magpie makes broad airy treetop nests that, cunningly, are almost indistinguishable from the branches. They may look flimsy but they are secure and Froelich's nest is not. If Froelich's nest were in a storm, the chicks would fall, and down would come baby, cradle and all.

What places Froelich's nest in the category of ‘art' and excludes the birds' nests? Intent? Froelich pays tribute to birds' technical and aesthetic flair, while the mudlark's goal is survival. Location? One nest is found in a gallery with a price tag attached; the other is in the wild. Design? Skill? On that count, the birds' craftsmanship is superior. Over the millennia, humans have studied avian architecture while birds – who were making homes for millions of years before
homo sapiens
populated the earth – learned about materials, structure, balance, endurance and disguise from the trees as well as, of course, through their own failures and successes.

The aesthetics of one bird's creative constructions has caught the attention of scientists. Scientists are fascinated by bowerbirds because they clearly demonstrate the power of sexual selection, the evolutionary force that Darwin defined to explain conspicuous male traits such as song, bright colours, and horns. In
The Descent of Man
, Darwin made particular note of the male bowerbird's display: ‘The playing passages of bower-birds are tastefully
ornamented with gaily-coloured objects; and this shews that they must receive some sort of pleasure from the sight of such things'. As writer Virginia Morell notes, these multi-talented birds can build a hut that looks like a doll's house; they can arrange flowers, leaves and mushrooms in such an artistic manner you'd be forgiven for thinking that Matisse was about to set up his easel; some can sing simultaneously both the male and female parts of another species' duet, and others easily imitate the raucous laugh of a kookaburra or the roar of a chainsaw. Plus, they all dance.

Satin bowerbirds opt for a blue palette with a few hints of yellow, while in the tropical woodlands of northern Australia the great bowerbird selects a fashionably muted range of ornaments – bleached snail shells, stones and pebbles, sometimes adding a note or two of olive-green for contrast. It might even choose only one object and one hue, such as uniformly sized grey stones, to create a dramatic, minimalist Zen-like effect. The male's ‘welcome mats' can include thousands of items, sometimes filched from other males competing nearby for the female's attention. In New Guinea, the Macgregor's bowerbird may spend weeks erecting, and years perfecting, a ‘maypole' bower up to two metres high atop a ring of moss. Others, like the Vogelkop, also found in New Guinea, make patterns with hot-pink flowers, black beans and wide green leaves on the jungle floor. Human rubbish is not ignored and the enterprising Vogelkops collect discarded softdrink cans and brightly coloured confectionery bags to lure the female. Indeed, Western researchers believed for decades that the bowers must be the work of diminutive undiscovered forest tribes.

Scientists are wary of anthropomorphism, the assignment of human characteristics to animals. As naturalist and author Lyanda Lynn Haupt comments, most young scientists take their first university classes under a sign that actually forbids it. At her college the sign read ‘Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize', and
it was ‘penned in ornamental calligraphy on faux parchment, as if it had been inscribed by a medieval monk taking dictation directly from God'. Anecdotal observation is also frowned upon. In Darwin's time, however, when the professions of ‘scientist' and ‘ornithologist' were being defined, anthropomorphism was not viewed with the same opprobrium with which current scientists regard it. Darwin's sympathetic participation with animals – which makes his writings about birds, for example, so engaging – was quite common. In the Falkland Islands, Darwin spotted carrion hawks which he described as ‘very mischievous and inquisitive … [they] are quarrelsome, and extremely passionate; it was curious to behold them when, impatient, tearing up the grass with their bills from rage'. Petrels approaching his ship were ‘tame & sociable, & silent' and a certain thrush especially ‘inquisitive'. Haupt describes how Darwin ‘utterly, and even joyfully, abandoned his privileged human status. He threw his own thoughts and behaviours right into the animal mix, putting all creatures, including humans, on the same continuum of consciousness'. It meant that rather than imposing human consciousness upon animal behaviours, Darwin ‘animalized consciousness in general'.

Recently Mike Hansell, emeritus professor at the University of Glasgow and an expert on animal architecture, has become emboldened to believe that ‘not only might bowerbirds feel pleasure from building the bower but also that we might be able to obtain objective evidence of it'. The bowerbird's skill at designing fabulous colour schemes and extravagant bowers develops over several years, and the more sophisticated the bower, the better the bird's success rate in attracting a female. It seems that males and females recognise and enjoy ‘a sense of beauty', as Darwin described it. What the bowerbird admires, so do we. Aghast at his temerity, Hansell wonders if he seems to be ‘losing his critical faculties in suggesting that bowerbirds might be artists'. After
all, the study of animal behaviour needs to show objectivity and investigate only the measurable to establish its scientific credentials. But Darwin's preparedness to use his imagination has encouraged a discerning and influential scientist like Hansell to consider that some non-human animals, such as the bowerbird, have a capacity for discriminating visual pleasure. Does the female bowerbird fall in love with a beautiful mind?