Avian Adoration
Dinosaurs live among us.
Forever we humans will dream of flight. A notion I once believed lied at the heart of our general bird related intrigue and it took many years for me to begin valuing the many other aspects of their highly evolved nature. Flight is obviously a physical marvel even before one considers feats of speed and agility, or their ability to migrate over unimaginably large expanses with accuracy that troubles me. I’m troubled by my disappointment in human evolution and our ignorance of the Earth’s magnetic field but I guess we’ve been busy with other things, like creating systems to navigate for us. I’m not sure what gives us the ability to subconsciously gauge direction, other than finding the sun, and that makes me wonder if birds can see the magnetic field. Possible, but Homing pigeons are disorientated by magnets but only when it’s cloudy – I don’t blame them – so it’s likely they navigate with sight too.
Whatever it may be, my love for birds has been rapidly expanding, without a recognisable cue but I think it may have emerged from realising that photographing birds is extremely skill-intensive, which is something that has often defined my subject matter. As much as that may be the case, I can’t help but think my exposure to Australia’s bird-life, particularly a strange relationship I had with a young magpie, was what founded this love. He (you can tell by their neck feathers – white for male, grey for female) used the dog-door to come in a snoop around, probably for food but never with much luck. The strange things was that the family unit that resided in our backyard spent years alongside us – it’s been proven that these birds (and other Corvids) pass information down generationally, I like to think we left a good impression on his parents – which is why he came inside so regularly.
