A green cloud. That's all you see initially. It swirls in the air like some rich pistachio mix then gravitates towards the tree it was always headed for in the first place.
The bottlebrush tree, so laden with blossom, and backlit by the sun, it looks like a great big red splotch left by an artist's giant brush. Into the red the 'green cloud' plunges and immediately disintegrates into a hundred minuscule atoms each of them now very distinctly perceived as a bird, and not merely green, but red too, and orange and a host of other hues.
These are the lorakeets, those winged drunken revellers that descend en masse and, there on the branches of the bottlebrush, have themselves a deafening party until, when the sun is about to wink its final goodnight far on the horizon, and it's time to go home, not one of them appears to be able to move, so inebriated with nectar are they.
They are an everyday lesson in overindulgence. They simply cannot resist a good time and a good thing like bottlebrush nectar speaks of their avian devotion to their own Bacchanalian instincts.
I have watched one, so filled up and so unsteady, its head kept nodding with greater and greater regularity threatening to pull it off the branch its claws clutched so vigorously.
For me, the human, this was pure comic delight. Others, once filled with the spirit of nectar, indulge in the most daring acrobatic feats, dangling upside down on wispy branches, then spinning around and up again, ostensibly righting themselves only to lose their balance once more and spin all the way round again like twirling emeralds on an affianced finger.
Day after day. Once cannot be sure if it's the same troupe but just before sunset, at that given time of the year, they arrive. And then, suddenly one day, as though a curtain has come down on the celebrations, they fail to turn up. I have, in an amused moment, wondered if they'd all been shipped off to bird rehab, to cure their vulgar addiction. What, I also wondered, do they feast on when the nectar's run out? It's a bit like asking where does one go when the oil's gone dry? Whither goes the party then? Do the lorakeets have contingency plans? A Plan B, for example. Or are they consummate addicts, fixated on a binge of a different kind until the bottlebrush blooms again?
Observation
To their credit, I have to say that in my observation of their antics, I have never seen a single bird lose its balance and fall to the ground leaving it totally bereft of wing power. It appears to have an inbuilt instinct for survival even when caught up in a seemingly inextricable situation. It appears to stop just one degree short of that threshold that it must not cross.
If it were a battery-operated bird, one would say it leaves itself just enough power in the battery to get itself back into the cosy nest where it then presumably just lets the night take over and do all the recharging. For tomorrow, in all likelihood, there's another treetop revel to attend!
Once, only once, was I witness to a tragic end to one of the 'green parties'. It happened so quickly. Just a whiz, as the missile cut through the air and then slammed into its target knocking it cold. And the young ignoramus who fired the rubber band catapult wasn't even drunk. Just having fun, said the bird-brained one. Only trying to scare them. Didn't mean to.
Again, to their credit, when one of their flock fell, the others just upped and left mid-party leaving the pendant blossoms swinging with a rare evening loneliness. There's a wealth to be learned from the birds. It's a supreme irony that this intelligence should have contributed the term 'bird-brained'.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
