A Season in Hell: October 28, 2022
Instead of writing my book, I look for a bird
A Season in Hell is a series of entries from my journal from 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.
I’m writing this in Sydney, where we moved from New York somewhat abruptly six weeks ago—a new city, in a new country, in a new hemisphere. Before I married a Sydneysider, Sydney is not a place where I ever thought I would live or even visit; most of what I knew about Australia came from the Men at Work video for “Land Down Under.”
There’s all different light, different smells, different birds. Creatively it’s very liberating. It would be an exaggeration to say that we moved to Sydney because I was stuck on my novel but it’s definitely helping me with my stuck novel.
Still, even here—et in Arcadia—I find ways to procrastinate. Those birds for example. There’s one particular birdcall that dominates the sound-scape of my neighborhood, a sequence of three rising hoots:
I get a little obsessed with the bird.
Instead of writing my novel I download a bird-identification app from the ornithology department of Cornell University to find out what it is. (The app is called Merlin, Arthurianly enough.) But despite some excellent bird-stalking by me, Merlin fails to identify the mystery bird.
Do I give up? I do not. Instead I download the Eastern Australia Bird Data Pack.
Still no luck—but Merlin does generate a list of about fifty birds that are likely to be present in my immediate area at this time of year, along with recordings of each of their calls. There are a lot more than fifty calls (because each bird has multiple calls) but naturally—because this is how you write a novel—I go down the entire list playing the birdcalls one by one till I find My Bird.
It’s called a Pacific koel. It’s in the cuckoo section, a large, red-eyed, hunchbacked individual. According to Wikipedia the Pacific koel is known, fantastically enough, as the stormbird, because you hear it in the rainy season. It’s also, less attractively, a brood parasite, meaning that like most cuckoos it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests so they have to raise the little Pacific koels as their own.
Horribly enough—I didn’t know this—some cuckoo chicks apparently take it further and actually kill the other chicks in the nest, leaving the mama bird to raise a child-murdering usurper as its own.
But the Pacific koel does not do this. So I guess we can admire its restraint. Back to work—but the hooting sounds more ominous now.