Attend
What sees is seen . Alan Garner A blackbird has laid three eggs and then abandoned them, in a nest she made at eye level in a tangled heap of pink jasmine against the house wall, near where she built before and brought out chicks. Perhaps the nest was a decoy – at any rate, it seems to happen often that birds build nests and lay eggs and leave them, so it’s either worth the effort to pre-emptively divert a predator, or not worth the risk of persisting where danger has actually been sensed – there are rats and quolls on the hunt at night and currawongs in the daytime. Snakes are coming out of hibernation too. Fantailed cuckoos, shining bronze-cuckoos, pallid cuckoos call from before daylight, sometimes in the middle of the night, though they’re not interested in the blackbird – they hunt the garden and forest for nests of smaller birds to lay their eggs in – wrens and thornbills, honeyeaters and flycatchers. If the host birds don’t outwit the cuckoos (false e