The First Koel

Canowie Brook, Budawang Ranges.

I have been busy, putting the final touches on (working title) Survivor Kids, a book scheduled to hit the shelves in February 2020. It's about how to survive in the wilds, places like the above, how not to get lost, stuff like that. I put the finishing touches on it last night, and now I will slowly and carefully start to polish it. And now, I have more time to muse, until the edits of Australian Backyard Earth Scientist begin coming back.

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.