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• 1 media/2018-08-29 (4).png 2018-08-28T04:35:05-07:00 The birds always perceive the changes in the atmosphere before we do… 69 Bird-Atmosphere Photo Essay visual_path 2018-10-17T01:50:24-07:00

  The birds always perceive the changes in the atmosphere before we do…

  
  
  

  How huge the tree, how tiny the weed, both under this soft stable membrane of the earth. The remains of the sunset’s orange light flash back with the grasses’ fresh smell, and voices of little invisible creatures – a choir of birds, lots of them, singing the dawn away, fading into the night sky. 
  
  
  The misty, foggy air permeates and infuses into every inch of the leaves, the playground, the clothes, the tree barks, the acne on the skin, the sparrows hidden and silent in the nests. 
  
  Early morning and it was the first day in weeks that there were so many promising clouds, and so tenuous was the birds’ morning call – pressure, moisture, proximity: every molecule in the air shouts, rain, rain.
  
   

  I wonder what the bird makes of the sky above – how the change in atmospheric pressure might feel against their fragile collection of hollow bone and feather. Does the immense pressure of gravity seem a heavier burden to the humble native miner than it does to us?
  
  
  Does the royal spoonbill too share the joy of warming his legs in the sun, cold from wading through the sharp waters of the lagoon? His plume splays, forming a gentle crest on the back of his head. Washed in the listless afternoon sun, one could be forgiven for reading pride in his stance.
  
   

  The eastern osprey makes her home at a height that dwarfs the surrounding trees, and her nest reminds us that if we stretch we can touch the upper reaches of our atmosphere. Reminds us that even though we can touch the sky momentarily, it is not ours. Though we made this tower, she has made it her own. Just as we adapt to nature, nature adapts to us.
  
  
  
  
  [Writing and photography by Gemma and Merah]

• 1 2018-10-17T07:51:07-07:00 Gemma Collard - Postcard 1 3 plain 2018-10-17T07:56:21-07:00 "Just as we adapt to nature, nature adapts to us."
  
  In working on bird worlds, I drew similar conclusions to this photo essay with regards to the interconnectedness of things. There is a sense that the perceived boundaries between nature and culture are constantly drawn into question when we stop to observe how each encroaches on the another.
  
  
  The photo essay here beautifully describes how we feel a kind of control over nature, when it seems that nature is ambivalent towards us. Of course, suggesting an ambivalence from 'nature' assumes we are somehow separate from nature. As the photo essay articulates, Indigenous connection to land and place is particularly powerful, as it highlights that Australian Aboriginal people have engaged with the idea of the natureculture for much longer than the concept has had a name.
  
  
  The image of the Eastern Osprey atop the light tower seems to me to depict a natureculture; the way that this bird has made an aspect of the human world her own is not dissimilar to the way we continue making aspects of the natural world out own. It almost functions as an unintentional protest that the bird has reclaimed a human space.
  
   - Gemma Collard