The birds.

THE OTHER DAY, in a park bordering the very heart Melbourne's central business district, I watched one of the rubbish bins energetically being emptied, contents disgustingly scattered over the surrounding lawn. The perpetrator of this civic nuisance was not one of our nowadays well-publicised "homeless" people, desperate for a crust. It was a bird; more specifically, a crow.

Fat, sleek, huge and wholly at home in the centre of town, with his powerful black legs and beak he found it no problem to spread out his breakfast for a gourmet's preliminary inspection: meat pie crust, chewed pizza ends, a half-eaten banana and--piece de resistance--part of a discarded chicken roll bearing distinct and liberal smears of lipstick around the bitten end.

I called this connoisseur a "crow", and as such I think most Australians would recognise him. But--no ornithologist--I remember long ago being told that the birds are really "ravens". (Corvus corvus, perhaps, was what my zoologist friend had called them.) Anyhow, for present purposes, crows or ravens--take your pick!

I confess to mixed feelings about these menacingly black "bush undertakers". On the one hand, if it is true that their ancestors fed the prophet Elijah as a refugee in the wilderness, then surely the descendants deserve some measure of divine protection. But there is less to be said for that tiresomely repetitive raven of Edgar Allan Poe, eternally rehearsing his single-word vocabulary: "Nevermore".

Crows--huge flocks of them at present--add little charm to our part of the parched and panting Australian countryside. Their harsh and timeless cry ("Fark! Fark! Fark!" as Graham Kennedy once famously rendered it on air) announces to the ear what the nose will soon proclaim: there's something dead not far away and the crows are having a party. Yet their scavenging clears up immense quantifies of carrion, and we should be grateful, if not admiring.

I hadn't intended to run on at such length about the crow, which I was using simply as one example of a wider thesis: that nature remains strictly for the birds.

Every day of the week some green doom-monger can be heard in lament for the dwindling or extinction of the grey-speckled turd or the umbrageous tit. These events (especially when they happen to be true) are sad, though perhaps just a little less than disasters on a cosmic scale.