Otherwise a snail

From the platform at Wolli Creek station the ibises on the wet green lawn beyond the scrub look like Mary Antoinette's sheep; along the cafe strip on Abercrombie Street I see a student look up at a pigeon that has just landed on the sign he's passing under; in the garden I step on something that is already disintegrating: probably a putrefying once-pink Illawarra Flame flower. Otherwise a snail.

A house for their roost

The pigeons and ibises of Bankstown have chosen a house for their roost and there is no other house in the suburb that will do instead. Today, for example, there were twenty three pigeons on the roof and five or six ibises (one was in flight). Tomorrow I am imagining fifty or sixty pigeons (since tomorrow is Saturday), and on Sunday a wedding of cockatoos or at least a fight. If you don't believe me, catch a bus down MacAuley Avenue and look to other side from the park. I have never seen a bird of colour on that roof, however. No matter that the inhabitants of Bankstown speak many more languages than the whole of Europe, the lorikeets and rosellas keep to the trees.

Wing

The grey pigeon's wing I saw in the dirt at the base of the tree made me think of the two white wings that were the only remnants I had found in the chook house of the pink-legged, grumpy, flightless, fan-tailed pigeon that used to lord it over the cat and the rabbit when I was a child - only this wing in the dirt was far less accusing.