Swooping Season: When Australian Birds Attack

When yet another “quality of life” survey offers lavish praise of Australia’s livability, they typically cite the country’s low crime rate, its relaxed lifestyle, its enviable climate (in the areas where most people live, anyway). But there’s one aspect of Australian life that doesn’t seem to figure into those calculations.

For three or four months out of the year, birds attack your face.

The massive black-and-white magpies. The similarly colored but smaller magpie larks. The loudmouthed, invasive mynahs. Stroll under the wrong shade tree and you’re liable to catch an eyeful of beak and talon. One moment you’re ambling along winking at the daffodils with a chuckle in your heart, the next a feathery flurry of fury erupts alarmingly close to your head. For all the talk of Australia’s killer snakes and spiders and sharks, birds are the only creatures to menace us yet.

My daughter was waiting to cross the street in front of her school one morning. A cute little magpie lark hopped and pecked the grass a few feet away. Cute, she remembers thinking. Her next thought was AAAAAGGHH SOMETHING’S TRYING TO SCRATCH OUT MY EYES!!!.

Without so much as a warning squawk, this little avian asshole came within a few centimeters of scraping her corneas out of her head. Afterward, as the wounds were dressed, the school nurse cheerfully chirped, “Oh, they’re swooping earlier this year!”

That’s maybe the craziest thing about swooping season. Somehow nobody seems to think it’s that big a deal. They think it’s kind of funny. All over the country birds are dive-bombing people’s heads in a Hitchcockian parade of horror, and Australians just chuckle and tell you about their cousin in Wollarangolong who’s had to wear an eyepatch since she was 5.

With the same dauntless spirit that has hewn civilization into the unwelcoming soil of a pitiless continent, and turned Vegemite into food, they get on with it. Cyclists glue CDs onto their helmets to freak the birds out. Kids carry a few almonds in their pockets to toss to the magpies, who can recognize faces, in hopes that next time they’ll see not an egg-threatening foe but a nut-tossing friend.

More simply, pedestrians just change their routes. I myself am avoiding a tree along our street, just one house down from us. My daughter’s family newspaper has the story:

The one thing you’re not allowed to do is fight back. Australia’s official protection for its native species is commendable, except when it keeps me from tracking down that magpie lark and swatting it like it’s a fuzzy green Wilson and I’m Ivan Lendl. I know, I know, it’s only protecting its babies. I happen to feel pretty protective about my babies, too.

So one morning when I was leaving the house to take my morning “run” (one block of running for every block of walking - OK, more like three blocks of walking), I stopped cold when I saw two small and still but clearly living lumps at the end of the driveway. I realized that among the general morning cacophony of Australia’s VERY LOUD BIRDS, a mynah bird was totally losing its shit in the tree above me, screeching and squawking like it was on fire.

Its babies were out of the nest. If I took one more step, my eyes would have to answer for it. I’ve grown rather fond of my eyes, especially in their unscratched state, and there’s no other route off of the property.

So, reluctantly giving up my exercise plans with a great heave of disappointment (yeah right LOL), I retreated inside while the Mynah Kids figured out what to do with those big flaps on either side of their torsos. I was the visitor here, after all, and this little bird family deserved a stage on which to play out the drama and comedy of life, the tender milestones that mark all of our journeys through the world, with my role limited to the grateful spectator. Also I left my tennis racket in Seattle.