ECO FLASH
1 min
Ospreys
Yann Toussaint
I'm paddling with my daughter, mapping the ospreys of the harbour, of the King and Kalgan rivers, charting the slow dispersal of previous year's nestlings. My youngest daughter asks questions as she tests new waters, fathoms new depths, returns to the safety of the shallows.
‘Where else do Ospreys live?'
And I tell her, ‘On every continent except Antarctica, migrating thousands of kilometres, across open ocean, sky-dancing in search of a mate.'
We skirt the harbour on an incoming tide, nosing our boats past submerged stones that masquerade as seals in the predawn light, past samphire flats and paperbark thickets, oyster shell middens and broken bottles, discarded rope and tackle, shopping trolleys, car tyres, beach wrack and shingle.
We round a bend in the river. There, on a dead tree by the water, the first osprey of the morning—the sunrise casts a rose-gold glow on the white of its breast as it watches us, crest feathers awry.
The second osprey of the day drops full-bodied into the water just in front of us, then rises heavily with a bream in hooked talons. When it perches on a nearby branch, a rain of silver scales falls into the river; in the stillness we hear the tearing of flesh.
My daughter is strangely silent. We paddle on.
Near Honeymoon Island, two ospreys and a Gormenghast of sticks—rough basketry the size of an armchair woven into the bleached skeleton of a wilding pine. Other nests follow— high in the arms of a jarrah tree, on crumbling rock stacks, added to over generations, lined with moss, dry grass and fishing line.
We let the current carry us home. On the phone that night, while she tells her older brother and sister, half a continent away, about all that she has seen, I step outside and listen to the keening of the wind, and the sound of the river running to the sea.
© Yann Toussaint. From Three Can Keep a Secret: Flash Fiction by Western Australian Writers, published by Night Parrot Press.
Yann Toussaint lives and writes on the south coast of Western Australia where he teaches permaculture and runs a community garden. His first poetry collection, The Tercel Bird, was published by Hallowell Press in 2016.
www.nightparrotpress.com
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