Black Cockatoos are Starving

Over the last couple of weeks we've been noticing a dramatic shift in the usual flight patterns of white-tailed black cockatoos over the valley. These magnificent, endangered birds are known as Ngolyenok in Noongar, and as Carnaby's in settler-speak. Sometimes we see 'Baudin's' as well, but usually on the other side of the river to the south-west. I say flight patterns 'over' the valley because, with rare exceptions, this has been the case for all the Sept/Oct periods (from the end of Djilba to the beginning of Kambarang) we've been here across fifteen years. 

Usually it's a migratory flight from north of here, with occasional pauses/perching before moving on to nesting hollows in wandoos at various points around the region (frequently bulldozed or cut down... it's an ongoing struggle to preserve nesting trees), or onward to the coastal plain to feed on banksia seeds. But this year is dramatically different — the 'wee-oo/wee-oo' calls have become a string of presence rather than snippets of audio. They have flown over, arced back, and hung around. Wing to wing, shadow by shadow, they are low overhead in cycles. 

We wondered if they were making use of flooded gum hollows down at the base of the valley for nesting — these flooded gums were largely destroyed years ago by a devastating 'controlled burn' that got out of hand and ignited dead leaves in forks and took out hundreds-of-years-old trees. But some remain basically intact, and others have grown back from the base of what remains of trunks (essentially chimneys). 

We are hearing the cockatoos constantly, and they are looping overhead throughout the day as they search for food. They are using York gums here as roosts (unusual), and astonishingly have started feeding on wild oats from the ground! I've also noticed on neighbouring 'properties' (what a word!) that they are foraging on animal fodder/feed in paddocks. 

I was quite literally writing a poem about this earlier today, when Tracy sent me an article by Emma Young and quoting botanist Kingsley Dixon about the paucity of food on the coastal plain for cockatoos visiting Boorloo/Perth due to the heat-stressed banksias not seeding as usual (late rains were another complicating factor) — further consequences of human-induced climate change. Everything suffers. To think that Chalice mining would wipe out cockatoo habitat to mine 'green metals' at Julimar (nearby)!— the contradictions are legion. 

As cockatoos starve, they search for alternative food sources, but this is an act of desperation. Unless we stop the war on nature (and on human life itself) in all its forms, we consign species after species to death. We simply don't have that right, and need to act on what we observe. A life of recording change brought about by human rapacity (and indifference) in poem after poem is confronting even for me. And the poem here speaks about the work necessary for all of us, myself included.

Ngolyenok —White-tailed Black Cockatoos — Have Become Part of My Quotidian

 

The feeding honk of cockatoos

that could be ‘contentment’ or pragmatism

is reworking my brain’s storage facilities,

 

multiplying in memory beyond the  2.5 petabytes

the Scientific American claims as capacity,

opening new pathways into non-neural tissue.

 

My hands and feet as repositories, to do the work.

Where for fifteen years they have passed over

at this time of year, cockatoos are demi-resident

 

and claiming something deeper, or opening

new possibilities given the impacts on their

habitat. Now I hear (more memory

 

will be required) that banksia woodlands

down on the coastal plain have failed to seed,

and these honking grazing cockatoos

 

are desperately feeding on wild oats

that grow outside the spray zones. I will

delay grass cutting a little longer

 

so they can augment their memories

with new possibilities, new scenes.

Then maybe the banksia will rise again,

restore memory to its optimal setting.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Destruction of Native Vegetation and Habitats on a Vast Scale

by John

Below is an extract from the activist poetry journal I have been keeping for thirty-five years.

At a time when what is left of Australia's natural environment is under serious threat, or is literally being demolished, I feel a need to bring to people's attention the fact that this assault is on a massive scale and happening everywhere.

The Western Australian Main Roads Department and private contractors are clearing old-growth trees on roadside reserves at a horrendous rate, and there is little or no protest. And when there is, objections are met with silence. 

The removal of old-growth trees along the York-Quairading Road is happening right now — dozens and dozens of massive salmon gums, wandoo trees, and York gums. The front page of the most recent York & Districts Community Matters confronts this situation. The mass clearing of roadside vegetation between Southern Cross and Kalgoorlie along the Great Eastern Highway is happening apparently without scrutiny or protest (though thousands of people drive past these clearings daily). 

What's happening at Beeliar is an expression writ large of the contempt in which officials and companies hold the natural environment. This is closely connected to the interface between capitalist exploitation and the rise of global fascism. In Western Australia, as elsewhere, the Environmental Protection Agency and other such bodies are increasingly becoming a rubber stamp for business and rapacious governments.

6/10/2016

I have just written to the CEO of Goomalling Shire regarding the intention to clear old-growth wandoos and salmon gums (well over a hundred years old with nesting hollows) from along the edge of the Wongamine Nature Reserve on the Nunile-Bejoording Road. Another local government outrage, indifference, insensitivity and maliciousness as an extension of the state’s and federal government’s machinery of environmental destruction as policy. Further, the bauxite miners are back and staking new claims through the Avon Valley, aiming to delete jarrah and marri forest to create open-cut mines. As the Toodyay Herald reports (October 2016, article by Brian Dale from the Avon Hills Mining Awareness Group): ‘It seems not a month goes by without the announcement of a new mining tenement in the Avon region.’

The bauxite miners are trying new angles on new zones in their effort to consume the remaining forest to make more window frames, planes, bits of cars, etc. This latest abomination even includes the Inkpen Nature Reserve. All voices of opposition — feet on the ground, literary, artistic, traditional owners (so often neglected and ignored in these conversations), social and cultural disobedience need to be focussed on preventing this cascading colonisation.

I wrote to the CEO of Goomalling Shire this evening:

Dear Clem Kerp, CEO, Goomalling 

I would like to add my voice to the deep concern being expressed over the removal of old-growth trees on the Bejoording Road in Nunile. I (and my family) know these trees very well, and they are essential to the health of the ecosystem in the region. There are few enough of such trees left, and the removal of these will have a long-term detrimental effect on bird-life and the environment in general. I beg you to change your plans for the road before it's too late. I am willing to assist in any way I can for this conservation aim.  Thanks. 

Sincerely,

John Kinsella

11/10/2016

No reply from the Shire of Goomalling re my letter. Will head out to the old-growth trees at Nunile later today and see what the situation is. Take photographs (or Tracy will). First stage of protest is the letter, second takes place in situ. Problem with trying to campaign for this is that it’s relatively ‘isolated’, and ‘lone’ action can leave one vulnerable to violence with little chance of success. When my brother and I were protesting old-growth karri logging in the southwest thirty-years ago, we were actually hunted down and shot at and took refuge overnight in the forest.

The Toodyay Naturalists’ Club are very angry about the situation and I will make contact/liaise with them if I can. Community is necessary in such actions. Can poems work this late in the piece? I will try.

                                                            *

I have written to the Toodyay Naturalists’ Club. All avenues with this one!

                                                            *

HORROR!!! ... The Shire of Goomalling have already chopped down those old-growth trees. We went to look at them this afternoon to work out an approach to help save them and the Shire had done the filthy deed. Tracy has taken dozens of photographs to document it. There’s almost nothing like these trees left in the area now. 

And as we lamented, a pink-and-grey galah appeared out of the hollow of one of the remaining trees in the ‘background’, looking down at us and the wreckage of its habitat. 

There is actually a vast space on the east side of the road that could have been used by the shire in their road widening, but no, they went for the trees where over the years Carnaby's cockatoos have nested. This MUST stand as a test case against such butchery. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

                                                            *

Letter to the Shire of Goomalling:

I am shocked and horrified to see the trees have already been chopped down. This is an outrage. This should not have been allowed to happen! I will be speaking loud and wide about this disgrace. It is an ecological crime.

John Kinsella

                                                            *

Swapping emails with The Toodyay Naturalists people. Sounds like something very malicious and calculated was behind this clearing of old-growth trees. The Naturalists’ Club is outraged and also want it to become a ‘test-case’ to prevent it ever happening again. It turns out that the area cleared wasn’t even part of Goomalling Shire, but actually part of Toodyay Shire.

And today the WA Government has said Roe 8 will go ahead through the vital Beeliar Wetlands despite a High Court challenge looking likely. Country is being eaten, eaten, eaten!

More: The Shire’s media release about the clearing (Feb, 2016) did not go to the people concerned about such issues and, what’s more, was released by Goomalling and not Toodyay (shire) where this ecological crime has been committed. And as for their ‘advisor’s’ comments that the Carnaby nesting hollow wasn’t in use, how ridiculous — Carnaby’s cockatoos return to hollows at intervals over many years. These old-growth wandoos and old-growth salmon gums are increasingly rare with the wholesale clearing of the wheatbelt (Goomalling only has 4.6 percent of its natural vegetation left according to the Naturalists’ Club in the Toodyay Herald, October, 2016). Cleared cleared cleared! That’s the only use poetic repetition should be put to — to illustrate grief, anger and to imprint itself on conscience.

‘Approval’

The neighbouring shire

clears old-growth trees — wandoo

salmon gums. Poaching.

The fall of nesting

hollows is to unleash voids

that cannot be filled.

Living stumps remain

after the chainsawing is done —

slices of trunks, limbs

laid out, distended

like a reconstituted

human skeleton.

Those living stumps will

be uprooted very soon —

erased. ‘Approval’.

Yellow crosses still

mark their bases — a yellow

that burns the psyche.

Form is of no use unless

it reconstitutes the flesh.

What use are the ‘rules’ of prosody in the face of such horror? What can poetry do? Language must break out of the constraints and restraints of the poem. Not become a set of shire minutes. I have sent this poem to Kwame as part ’45.’ of our collaboration: it’s a space in which I can work out activist approaches, as he also deals with the hells of hatred, the murdering of black men and women by the police forces of the United States.

45.

Another environmental outrage here, Kwame.

A neighbouring shire has manipulated a boundary

and cleared old-growth trees from the edge

of a nature reserve. I had been going into campaign

mode to try and stop them. We went out to visit

these old wandoos and salmon gums -- vital

nesting trees as it takes over a century of growth

and work by fire and termites, fungi and storms,

by all the natural acts of existence, for suitable

hollows to form in limbs and trunks, places

where cockatoos and parrots can lay eggs,

rear their chicks. Fewer and fewer of such

trees are left, as the land is ravaged by farmers

and developers and miners greedy for every

foothold, we must ensure that on the edges

and in the niches, these habitats persist.

But to go out and see the massacre

unleashed -- the horror of butchered

trees’ corpses, and a lone pink-and-grey

galah looking on from a remaining

nesting hollow in a nearby tree:

it imprints deep. Even the sunset

is bereft. But I've no room for metaphor --

it feels tainted, it feels like insult to injury, to death.

JK

                                                            *

Over the years I have noticed that some activists can be disturbingly territorial about their ‘causes’ and campaigns. They wish to advocate in their ways, and through their controls. One offers to help and it’s ignored; or, say, when I was trying to save bushland and watercourses near Walwalinj in York when the shire wanted to create an ‘equine precinct’, a well-known environmental advocacy group showed no interest despite my repeatedly writing to them — they were focussed on their own campaign (necessary, but that doesn’t alter the need to be connected in these things). We will possibly have different views on how to approach issues and the best way to resolve them or advocate, but we need to communicate and, where possible, work together without hierarchies.

                                                            *

Astonishingly, just to finish the day, a far right ‘One Nation’ senator said in his maiden speech to parliament today that the nation belongs to ‘Anglo-Celts’, and that it is — wait for it — ‘being colonised’ (by non-Anglo-Celts?) and this his sort (the ‘real’ people of Australia?) are ‘being swamped’. He wants the ABC replaced with the ‘Patriotic Broadcasting Corporation’. It would seem like a sick joke but it’s true. Australia IS on the verge of falling into full-blown, literal fascism.

[end of extract from journal]

John Kinsella