I spotted it first, naturally — The Boss was fretting over some toilet paper left strewn along the track. The spoonbill stood on the far bank of the river, at the water line, white-gold in the early light. It was pacing slowly along with its head down, like a maths professor pondering a theory.
The yellow-billed spoonbill is a tall bird, somewhere near 90 centimetres, most of which appears to be dignity. Its legs are long and yellowish. Its face is bare, framed by a thin black line in the breeding season.
And then there is the bill. Pale yellow, long and flat, flaring at the end into a broad spoon. It is the kind of instrument you would expect to find in a silver service drawer at a country club that no longer admits new members.
I have a mouth built for retrieving ducks. It is a fine, functional instrument, much admired in the field, but it does not hold a spoon on the end of it, and I will admit to a moment of evolutionary envy.
The spoon is not for decoration. The bird wades into shallow water, lowers the bill, parts it slightly, and sweeps it from side to side in a steady arc, like an old man with a metal detector on a beach.
It doesn’t look for its food, it feels for it. The inside of the spoon is lined with sensitive touch receptors, and when anything edible brushes past — a shrimp, a water beetle, midge or a careless tadpole — the bill snaps shut. This works in muddy water, in poor light, in conditions where lesser birds would give up and go home. It is essentially like fishing by Braille.
I considered explaining this advantage to the Boss, who has spent 40 years looking for his car keys and spectacles by sight alone. I decided against it.
The yellow-billed spoonbill is ours. It is found only in Australia, turning up across most of the mainland but favouring the inland and the east, wherever there is fresh water shallow enough to wade in. It occasionally strays to New Zealand.
A nomad, it follows the rain. When the inland floods, it goes where the water has gone and breeds in colonies, building flimsy stick platforms in trees or reed beds and laying two to four eggs. Both parents share the sitting. There is a lesson in that for certain households, but I am not paid to deliver it.
In breeding season it grows long lacy plumes across its chest, like an Edwardian gentleman dressing for the opera. The rest of the year it makes do with plain white. It is mostly silent, offering the occasional grunt at the nest, an attractive habit the cockatoos and corellas — those shrieking, vandalising feathered hooligans — could learn from.
It also flies with its neck stretched out straight in front, unlike the herons, who fold theirs back like a garden hose.
New Boy, who finally worked out that the contents of the KFC box had been consumed, looked up and barked at the spoonbill. The spoonbill did not so much as flinch. It kept sweeping, patient and methodical, the calm professional ignoring the heckler in the front row. Woof!
