Image: Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 movie, The Birds.

The currawongs have been off their trolley lately, scrapping and carrying on like headless chooks in the liquidambar out the back.

Normally about a dozen of them in the neighbourhood, gargling with their throaty onomatopoeic warble. That trademark cacophony has snowballed with the arrival of another two dozen or more of the black flapping crackers.

Look for all the world like an unkindness of ravens, white tail-feathers and yellow orbs aside. And they’ll whirl, twist and dive-bomb like airborne dervishes in their bid for dominance of backyard and back-lane trees.

Not sure what’s driving this dogfight – territorial stakeouts or just general lairising. Probably the latter. All swagger.

Currawongs form flocks of up to 50 in winter, just to muck about. I saw repeated king-of-the-castle fights where birds plonked themselves atop tall pencil pines as others attacked, one by one.

No sooner would one be turfed off than other contenders arrived, Stuka-fashion, to dislodge them in a blitzkrieg of feather and talon.

Great sport, I have to say, even if it seems like a Hitchcock white-knuckler.

Curiously, some people I know read more into it.

Claim it’s like ant activity firing up before earthquakes. All part of a collapsing planet, that’s their considered prognosis.

Just look, they caution, at the recent aurora flare-ups, volcano blasts, tremblors, the sun’s magnetic polarity flip, sun flares, power-grid failures, the solstice, Earth’s orbital wobble, blood moons, high tides, warming oceans, CO2, plate tectonics, US winter fires, the East African Rift, a sixth ocean …

That’s not to mention fears of nuclear obliteration. So maybe it’s no surprise they’re sensing a looming Armageddon.

For my part, thought, I think I’ll keep the tinfoil hat in the cupboard just for now.

Nothing’s new in generic anxiety about the state of the world – be it geological, geopolitical, geothermal, environmental, military, religious, economic or extraterrestrial.

People have been petitioning the heavens for succour since cavemen thumped rocks on the ground and howled skywards to supplicate an angry sol, luna or meteorite shower that peppered their hunting grounds.

Fear and fear-mongering have morphed into more sophisticated readings of the entrails these days, of course, but it’s a fair bet old Gaia will survive it all.

She’s been through five mass extinctions to date, what’s another?

Humans, well, that might be another matter. But as an Irish sage once impressed upon me: You worry, you die – you don’t worry, you still die.

Meantime, I might join the birds and take up climbing trees again. Did it for a job once, with a chainsaw. Used to be great fun.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 24 June 2025.