Through the day I hear the hauntingly evocative song of a curlew echo across the creek. The singer is elusive, invisible. Against the variegated greys and browns of the foreshore, the bird's mottled plumage is too fine a camouflage. A black headed gull draws my gaze with its a sharp 'peep, peep' submarine sonar call. I turn my head - and there before me is the curlew, drinking from a rill.
From the length of the down-curved scimitar bill, this is a female. She's rarely still. Energetically zig zagging her way across the glutinous mud - leaving a trail of footprints in her wake. Its as if she's tacking against a headwind, like Stargazer yesterday.
As she scurries across the amorphous aqueous landscape, neither fully land nor fully water, she probes deeply with her beak . Often she comes up empty handed . Sometimes she is rewarded with a writhing, wriggling, worm..
She pauses briefly to swallow and savour her supper, before hurrying on. The tide is on the make. Her dinner table diminishing before her hungry eyes.
It is time for Stargazer to catch that tide upriver. To return to her home berth. Our government has confirmed the withdrawal of the fourteen day covid quarantine . Europe is our oyster. There is provisioning to be done.
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