The Blue Mountains, Lyrebirds and Stories We Tell

Lyrebird Lyrates and Filamentaries

The Blue Mountains in winter: entire forests of gum trees, their spindly limbs crowned by green mops of leaves, thrash in torrents of air scouring the landscape. One image in particular comes to mind: perched on the heights at an angle against the gusting winds, I look out over a ledge into the depths of the Jamison valley. In massive gulps, the airstream around me is stripping water off the greenery after a rainy night, stripping the water, atomizing it into mist and then scattering it over the lip of an escarpment into the country stretching below.  And there in front of me a rainbow, really rain-ribbon, or rain-serpent, materializing and evaporating and materializing again, soaring up the steep slopes from below and anchoring itself in the red sandstone cliffs opposite me.  The Blue Mountains are, if anything, a landscape of rainbows, precipices and wind.

And yet. later, hiking down the escarpments to the wooded bottom lands of the valley, I was amazed to find that terrible wind dissipating with every step, the air becoming nearly still and birdsong audible.  As if the valley below were the permanent eye of an unending hurricane raging above it.

Actually the Blue Mountains are a massive plateau eroded away in great chunks to form a series of forested canyons and valleys framed by towering escarpments.  And the lowlands are, it turns out, a great  place to encounter a lyrebird.  At least in mid-winter during their their mating season.  Belying their reputation, the birds were not at all difficult to find: the racket they make, thrashing about in the forest as they dig in the duff for insects and salamanders, unabashedly signals their presence. And they are not concerned about exiting the scene, unless the human visitor is a bit too insistent about approaching near.  And even if one cannot see a lyrebird directly, the males, perched on their hidden thrones, mounds built up of dirt and leaves to impress a cohort of mating females, fill up the forest with whistles and  throstlings, cooings and tweets, twitters and buzzings and croaks in stereophonic virtuosity.

Blue Mountain Escarpment

At one point I did approach a male to capture a better image, in fact the one appended above.  Eventually, impatient with my insistence, he flew down the slope in a power glide (this particular set of wings being not good for much else), his body configured in a blue ideogram of feathers so perfect, so unearthly, that it surely had escaped from a special effects program for high end video games. The two lyrate tail feathers, as they are termed, are held, at least during flight, curved open in a shape suggesting the musical instrument after which the bird is named.   Mating is another business altogether, according to avian ethologists, with the tail feathers directed forward so that they hover over the male's head as he struts his stuff.

This plumage is hypnotic.  To call it beautiful obscures the fact that its most powerful virtue is that of dissemblance, of shape shifting.  As the male digs incessantly into the earth in search of goodies he tilts his rear upward--this ungracious posture unleashing a furious dance of feathers in which the two chestnut brown lyrates are transformed into a pair of hyperactive snakes writhing in mid air over the earth.  The lacy filamentaries also composing the tail confuse the light around the lyrates and render the ensemble ghostly, a mixture of form and void, uncanny flesh dissipating into shimmers of airy light.  Spellbound at this sight, I can sympathize with the fidelity of the mating females to such a display.  In some part of me, I'm seduced too and prepared to stay here as this male's consort for eternity.  Surely this is Eden and this lyrebird Adam.

Given the flamboyant feathers and preternatural talent for mimicry, the lyrebird not only fascinates humans but leaves us envious.  You Tube is filled with videos showing off the capacity of this species to ape everything under the sun: from kookaburras to car alarms.  In one of these, David Attenborough encounters several, obviously not in the wild (of this fact he is not forthcoming: see Hollis Taylor's blog on this issue), that can mimic camera clicks, the buzz of chain saws and men working nearby.. But this fascination with a captive bird's talent for simulation leaves me wondering: Why is the capacity in a living creature to duplicate the sound of a fire alarm so noteworthy?

Lyrebird Habitat in the Jamison Valley

To this question I have a hopeful and not so hopeful answer. I'll start with the hopeful and more subtle point first.  In giving voice to click of camera and whirring of electric-motored film advance, the captive lyrebird transforms the inert noises permeating his surroundings into something rich and strange. This power of living things to transcend the merely mechanical and efficacious has recently been christened "biosemiosis."  In this term one registers how the very stuff of life, from our genetic coding on up, involves the expression and reception of signs among the living kinds, as well as within the bodies of every living kind. The entirety of creation it turns out is full of messages in search of reception, which is to say, full of storytelling.  And so I am thankful for the closeup in Attenborough's video of the captive lyrebird's beak, as an electrical whirring emanates forth from its gifted voicebox: in my very hearing, a mechanical sound, an intricate, human-made contraption of moving metal and plastic gears, finds a renewed and uncanny dwelling place in living flesh of another living kind.  In this reverberation of a vibration, it turns out, something more than mere efficacy, the chief virtue of technological existence, emerges.  The camera leaves its imprint on the lyrebird's hearing not as machinery but as encounter, not as redundancy but as creative opportunity.  

But that very closeup is also distressing, particularly given Attenborough's condescending take on the moment. It is a matter of the story, after all.  And the story Attenborough tells and enacts is one of a huckster:  "Look at this," his tone intimates. "Ain't it grand?"  But is this the story worthy of a species 15 million years upon the face of the earth, one whose forebears, unlike our own, are part of the very strata of the continents? Rather than questioning the process by which the vocabulary of a lyrebird is overtaken by the sounds of cameras, car alarms and buzz saws, the fact is simply sketched out as an elaborate joke, a trick.  This exchange of bird and human here is just one step up from trick dolphins jumping through hoops and elephants balancing on each other's backs.  Of course, what is different is that the lyrebird comes to this trick voluntarily via its own practices.  But the circumstances of those practices are not voluntary at all: he has been confined to a cage.  And this question haunts me:  Why is the mimicking of machinery so noteworthy in a living being?  And listening again to it, I realize this: This bird no longer is my Adam; his power to seduce these human ears has been reduced to one that amuses.  

The Three Sisters

Other stories, it should be noted, are told of the lyrebird, including stories by peoples who were willing to follow for tens of thousands of years the lines of song laid down by a living kind across country.  The Gundungurra people, for instance, who own the stories of what we whitefellows call the Jamison Valley, have something quite different than Attenborough to say about the lyrebird and its mimicry.  But their stories are for the most part kept alive and cared for, when they have not been annihilated by colonial violence, in the closed circles of their keepers.

Still one story might be told, a story that was falsely attributed to the Grundungurra and was actually authored by a whitefellow schoolgirl by the name of Patricia Stone. Her tale involves three sisters who are transformed into stone by their father, a powerful cleverman, to save them from a bunyip, a terrifying creature who lurks in the waters waiting to feast upon anything that comes by, particularly women and children. Angered at the daughters' transformation, the bunyip chases the father, until cornered, he transforms himself into a lyrebird with the same magic bone he had used upon his daughters.  And then, to his dismay, he discovers the bone has been lost.

If a whitefellow is to tell a story about country, this is perhaps not a bad start.  And it leaves its audience with important questions to chew upon. Why, for instance, does the clever man turn his daughters to stone, even as he chooses a lyrebird for his own moment of shape shifting? Parents, in protecting their children, can go too far and with tragic results. Yet by throwing rocks heedlessly from the cliff top (which is what initially alerts the bunyip to their presence), the daughters themselves are implicated in their petrification due to their own thoughtlessness. And there is the issue of that magic bone.  It is powerful but also limited in its efficacy. And it can simply be misplaced.  The contours of the real emerge here in an intricate interplay of themes and forces:  the ferocity of love, the carelessness of  youth, the outbreak of elemental violence, the limited means of wisdom and and the fragility of human power.   In the face of the bunyip's hungry maw the cleverman chooses song over blood letting.  Shakespeare would be pleased.

But what most intrigues me today is the cleverman's decision to become a lyrebird.  The ways in which humans find themselves affirmed in the lyrebird, even as the lyrebird finds its peculiar talents affirmed in human beings is worthy of more than a little thought. As I hear it, the telling of this metamorphosis, of man to lyrebird, gives words to the mystery of language itself. For words clarify the meanings of things, as the act of naming calls forth reality and reality calls forth naming. And like the lyrebird, are not humans in the business of singing their existence in borrowed song?  We clothe ourselves, both in body and in thought with the skins and voices of all the other living kinds. When all is said and done, we are made of words.  If a human is to become another animal, certainly becoming a lyrebird makes a lot of sense.  Thank you Patricia Stone for this thought.