Urban Naturalist on Tour (Part 1)

Zoe Sadokierski

Whenever I travel, I keep a sketchbook on hand to record places, experiences and observations. These sketchbooks fill a shelf in my studio, and most of them contain drawings of birds. I don’t record bird sightings as ‘data collection’ or as a Bird Life List, I just enjoy drawing birds.

In 2010 I took a road trip to Longreach, an outback QLD town where all the streets are named after birds: emu, galah, cassowary, kingfisher, bustard, brolga, grebe. Sketching top knot pigeons, magpies and magpie-larks from inside the pub, a boozy local sidled up to me and asked “what about gaol birds, do you draw ‘em?”

In Tambo, a shamble of alarmingly fat Muscovy ducks – introduced species from Mexico or Central and South America – ambushed our river-side lunch. In comparison to the Jemimah Puddleduck specimens familiar to city people like us, the Muscovy’s red and purple warty faces seem monstrous. As the feral aliens came at us, my travel companion bolted to the car, leaving me juggling half-eaten sandwiches and laughing at his hysteria, until I heard the creepy panting – PANTING – and fled too, my laughter now tinged with panic.

On the road between Mitchell and Morven, I counted 13 dead kangaroos. In the city, dead animals are edited and packaged for us by butchers, removing evidence of violence and death. On country roads, they materialise as dull lumps in the distance, blooming in increasingly graphic detail, until they are gone in a flash. Crows casually picking at the carcasses ambled out of the car’s path at the last possible moment, braver, it seems, than us.

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