The Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street.

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It’s killing him, the poor little bugger. He’s only five months old, but I can’t see him making it through the winter. One month, maybe two at best. But he doesn’t complain. Birds don’t. They put up with what they can’t change and suffer in silence.

He’s the oldest of the two chicks from this years brood. The fourteenth of fifteen that Crookfoot has produced since we moved in here eight years ago. And he’s male. That you can tell from the attitude, the volume, the cheerfully loutish behaviour around the cheese dish on the front steps. Crookfoot lost her last two in a rush late last year. The younger one, a slender female with a delightful disposition and endlessly chatty was chased out of the territory, as is the usual practice.

That left Mother and J.R, her one-eyed, seven year-old son, in residence. There have been more than a dozen others over the years, raised from squawking fluffy bundles until they’re able to look after themselves, then evicted, sent out to try their luck, and risk their lives in the big wild world.

J.R wasn’t thrown out. Not for him the savage pecking and ruthless methods of magpie eviction. His monocular disposition made him too vulnerable, and he stayed, an overgrown baby at first but growing over the years into a loyal support and handsome son, always ready to help feed each year’s new brood, long after Crookfoot had given up on the endless round of stuffing squawking beaks with beef, cheese and whatever else turns up. He was a big lad at the end, strong, broad-shouldered, a solid and respectable citizen, with a powerful neck due to his endless need to scan for danger with his one good eye.

He was hit by a car in the last week of April ‘07. Blind-sided one last time in Goulbourn Street by one of the endless supply of utes and vans that swarm around the endless supply of ghastly townhouses being built there. He didn’t get much of a send-off. I saved him from the ants, but wrapped him in newspaper and put his body, a good weight too, in a council rubbish bin. I didn’t have anything better in me. I’d used up all my ability to do funerals and grieving when Catherine died in November 2006, and by the end of April, two weeks after her birthday, I was just too heart-sore, too cried-out to cope with another parting. Even for a magpie I’d known all his life, had fed since he was a skinny squawker at the bottom of the pecking order.

I marked his passing by breaking the bowl he’d fed from all these years. Slid it off the top step with my foot and watched it crack into three pieces. I shed a few tears. A week or two later I went down to Goulbourn Street at three in the morning and spray-painted a memorial to him in the middle of the road; his name, the date, twelve feet high. It’s almost gone now, a year later. I’ll go down some night soon and redo it for him. I don’t sleep at all any more during the dark hours so I’ll have plenty of opportunity.

He was replaced a week or two later by a blow-in. A yearling male magpie chased out from a clan somewhere else. This is too rich a territory to go to waste, and too big to be defended by Crookfoot alone. It took a month or so for her to establish that she was top bird. The males are aggressive, and slow enough learners that it takes a while, and several quick, vicious pecks in the side-ribs to get the message. He’s called Boofhead, Boofy-Boy, or just Boof for short. They get the names that seem to fit, and he was a very boofy boy to start with, all wild eyes, and noise, and beak, and attitude.

Since then he’s put on some weight, learned his place, acquired adult plumage and, since this years brood was born, taken up where J.R left off as primary child-care, beak-stuffer and all-around aero-dynamic role-model. A year is a long time for a young magpie, and he’s much smarter, more capable, more able to keep up his end of a conversation now.

Crookfoot loses interest in the endless feeding they require fairly quickly. Once they can fly she spends as much time alone as possible, delegating the on-going care and feeding to whoever’s number-one bird after her. Given that she builds the nest, mates, lays the eggs, sits on them in all weathers and feeds them once they hatch in November she’s usually had a gut-full by February. She has a look that’s incredibly eloquent at this time of year when they all turn up for food around five o’clock.

She’ll watch Boofhead running back and forth, endlessly feeding one noisy beak after another, and look at me with the eye of a mother who’s done this too many years to count, and would just as soon have a quiet chat, a cup of tea, and close the door to the nursery. There’s a genuine, parent-to-parent connection. I feel it especially when I rush off to pick up Nell from work when she’s had a lousy day, and can I drop everything and pick her up right now? After all, what could I possibly be doing that’s of any consequence?

Nothing, nothing at all.
What indeed?

This years pair were fairly typical. A loud, solidly-built, bombastic, aggressively shouting male, and a slender, quieter, more intelligent and thoughtful female. The female is doing fine. There’s plenty of food, plenty of minced beef and grated cheese available from me, and the recent rain has pushed plenty of edible species up out of the wet ground. She’s injured a foot, and is limping, but it doesn’t look permanent so she’ll be fine, I think. But the boy is in trouble.

I noticed it first about six weeks ago, mid January. He had a misshapen upper beak. It was fine on one side but had a bulbous swelling on the other. It didn’t bother him so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Nell and I even joked about him being the Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street. But now it’s getting worse by the day. The swollen beak started to get larger about three weeks ago. Then I noticed a similar dark clumping of growth on his left foot. It didn’t slow him down any, and it doesn’t appear to cause him pain, just made it look lumpy and inelegant.

Now the growth on the beak has spread with some similar growths around one eye. In the last two days it’s obscured his eye and he’s now blind on one side. I’ve spotted more growths on his left leg around the ankle joint, up near the body, not big, but growing. And he’s getting a little thick in the neck, so something may be happening under the feathers. He’s still got thick fluffy down around his head and shoulders. I don’t think that he’ll live long enough to grow new plumage.

I have no idea what it is. If it spreads to his other eye he’ll be finished. A blind bird doesn’t last very long. Either way I don’t think he’s got much time left. It’s growing faster than he is, poor little sod. Poor noisy, aggressive, hungry, determined, full-of-life, little sod.

I hope it’s clean, at the end. Quick, merciful.

We had a baby butcher-bird a few years back who had an obstruction in his throat that killed him. He couldn’t swallow. We gave him food ground extra fine, but in the end he couldn’t swallow anything, though he kept trying.

One night he came in and perched on an arm-chair an hour before dark. He couldn’t eat, but we sat and talked to him, Nell and I, and he stayed quite late, well after dusk. He drew comfort from our company, felt loved, cared for. He knew we were with him, knew that our lives overlapped, that he meant a full life’s-worth of being, and dying, and memory. His name was Ralph.

A little human warmth goes a long way, on very small wings sometimes. The next morning the neighbour found him, under a bush next to the fence. She handed him to me and we gave a him a burial in the backyard under the fig-tree.

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