Waiting

Waiting. We are waiting. Rob and I were the first to arrive and have commandeered what we think is the prime spot, a corner of the boardwalk overlooking the beach and foredune. We have since been joined by about a dozen others. We are all waiting. Behind us, the sun has dropped from the sky and the dusk surrounds us. I watch as the beach in front pales from white to cream to yellowish. Finally to grey. The sea loses its blueness and blends through slate shades to dark grey, the break of the waves a foamy white line across it. The wind from the south east picks up, bites cold. I envy the warm woollen jacket and beanie the young women standing next to me is wearing. Kick myself for not bringing a beanie. I shiver. Fold my arms across my chest to hold in warmth, tucking my hands inside my elbows. I lean in to Rob, wanting his body warmth. We wait.

We wait in silence. 

The silence surprises me. The obedience of it. The interpretive signs insist that we must wait in silence. But there is no one here to enforce it. The signs say arrive before dusk and wait quietly for darkness. The signs say no torches or flash photography or phones. We all arrived before dusk and are waiting quietly. No one uses a phone or has a torch or a camera with a flash.

Just as dusk falls, a group of four young tourists arrives, chatting in a foreign language, laughing, joking. A woman gives them a stern look, holds a finger to her lips. The youths fall silent, join the rest of us waiting, looking, silent. Peering into the growing darkness. A waxing crescent moon hangs in the western sky, blurred by light cloud. 

Four Pacific terns fly along the shoreline, wide wings carrying them on the breeze, lifting higher with languid strokes. They disappear.

Still we wait.

I’m cold now. Properly cold. I’m shivering. A rhythmic rock. I feel my body clenched on itself, trying to hold in my warmth. Someone coughs. It makes me feel vulnerable. (Days later, when I am full of a chest cold, I will think back on this moment, when I felt frozen and someone nearby coughed, and think that is probably when the viral particle slipped along and into my airways.) But for now, I am waiting.

I feel my own competitiveness. I want to be the one who points, silently of course, and has the others’ eyes following my direction. But I don’t point. I can’t see anything to point at. Just sand and sea and deepening darkness. I feel my growing doubts that I’m going to be able to see anything at all.

The shearwaters come first. There are none and then there are hundreds. Just like that. The air is suddenly thick with them. I expected to see them approaching over the sea, but no. I saw nothing until they were in the air above and beside and all around. Soaring, swooping, landing. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. No, thousands. This spot, the Neck on Bruny Island off the south-eastern coast of Tasmania, is home to a colony of over 10,000 short-tailed shearwaters. 

Ten thousand sounds like a lot, but it is only a fraction of the total population. Short-tailed shearwaters, or mutton birds as they are also knows, are  the most common seabird in Australia. There are about 23 million of them and there are hundreds of breeding colonies across south-eastern Australia, just like this one I am standing in the middle of. 

I keep ducking as the shearwaters fly past. They are fast. Their wings stretch to a span of about a metre. The air is thick with them. I see hardly any of them land, but land they must. They land and slip into their burrows, which are apparently about a metre deep. It’s late October as I stand in the cold and watch the spectacle of the birds coming in from their day of feeding out on the ocean. They are coming in for the night, pairing up with their mates. They mate for life, although failure to raise a chick often leads to relationship breakdown. This time of year they are housekeeping and mating, getting ready to lay an egg and raise a single chick. They return to the same burrow year in, year out. Looking at the holes in amongst the tussocks of dune grasses, I wonder how on earth they find the right burrow at the end of each day, let alone each year. But so they do. In a few weeks, this daily sojourn in from the sea at nightfall will cease for a while as the shearwaters stay out at sea to fatten up before the long period of incubating the single egg. The male and females take turns incubating - two weeks on, two weeks off, flying in to sit and flying out to feed - a FIFO roster (fly-in-fly-out, for those not living somewhere dominated by mining industry jargon).

Suddenly they are gone. The air that was thick with the birds is empty again. The mass arrival is finished. I stand in the cold dark silence and strain my eyes to the sky, where just moments before there were the dark silhouettes of birds flying. Now there are only milky stars in the clouded night sky. The shearwaters are all in their burrows for the night.

I have been so awed by the shearwaters that I have almost forgotten that they aren’t the main reason why we came here this evening. I look back to the beach, dark now, and strain my eyes, looking for movement across the sand. The young guy standing the other side of the woman next to me (she of the warm coat and beanie) points down straight in front of me. I see a scurry of movement, a dark back, a blurred outline. A fairy penguin! It moves so quickly I barely see it. I can’t quite fathom how it made its way across the expanse of sand between breaking waves and dune vegetation without me catching a glimpse of its movement. It disappears under the boardwalk, literally below my feet. The young couple walk away, off to watch it emerge from the other side. Rob and I stay where we are, vigilantly watching. We see nothing. Not a hint of another penguin crossing the sand.

This spot, here on Bruny Island, is also home to a fairy penguin colony. Like the short-tailed shearwaters, they nest in burrows here on the sand dunes. There are only a hundred or so pairs of penguins here. By day, the parents hunt out at sea; at night they come in, snuggle in their burrows until morning. Now, in October, they have chicks in the burrows waiting for the nightly return of parents and food. Still, I can’t fathom how I don’t manage to see any waddle across from the sea to the dunes. But I don’t see a single one.

I turn as someone taps me on the back. It is the warm coat woman. ‘Over here,’ she whispers, ‘there are some over here.’ She beckons. Rob and I follow. There along the edge of the boardwalk, fairy penguins are slipping into their burrows. I see a spray of sand ejected as one races in. A few dark blurs among the foliage. Nothing else. It’s now fully dark and very cold. We decide to head back to our accommodation, to a hot drink and our warm room.

As we walk along the boardwalk towards the carpark, I can hear rustling in the grasses. And something else, a gentle ‘bwwrr, bwwrr … bwwrr, bwwrrr’ as the penguin parents and chicks greet each other. Suddenly I don’t mind that I didn’t clearly see them making their way across the beach. This sound, this strangely intimate, yet wild, sound, fills me full. I don’t even feel so old anymore.

And there’s something else. There was a sign at the end of the boardwalk where the steps led down to the sand. The sign said ‘Penguins only, from dusk until dawn’. There was no gate, no barrier, no threat of fines. Just those simple words on a plain sign. Yet not a person on that boardwalk that night set a foot onto that sand. We all left it for the penguins. That’s the sort of thing that restores my hope for humanity.

Thanks for reading,

Jill

Inside

While in Tasmania, I did a book event with Matthew Evans at Fat Pig Farm. So much fun! Matthew and Sadie were so generous and they really know how to throw an event. Highly recommend a visit there if you get a chance. They have some very cool events coming up. Their website is having a rebuild but they’re easy to find on the socials.