an encounter with seabirds

new works by Kirsty O’Connor and Cally Yeatman

since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine

the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it. *

The form and stories of seabirds, have caught our imaginations. Older than us, they are longer connected to the sea and the places they return to on their 10,000 year patterns of migration to breed. We meet them in their still point – when they surface from their ocean realm to touch us in our land based world. Otherwise they inhabit the vast distances of the sea, this other world, as strange as the moon, that we live alongside or on the surface of.

Only 350 out of 11,000 odd species of birds have taken to the sea. For all their differences a certain way of life unites them…slow to mature, waiting many years to lay an egg …often raising a single chick…They are not boom and busters, but steady long term investors… **

They arrive when the summer days lengthen, on their own river in the sky, no visas just an instinctual knowledge of their world. They touch down at the edge, into their noisy crowded colonies and encountering these, one is overwhelmed by this seemingly boundless vitality; but the population of seabirds globally has dropped by two thirds in the last sixty years and the pressures are only increasing. A third of all seabirds are at threat of extinction.

*Elisabeth Bishop from a letter to Robert Lowell **Adam Nicolson from ‘The Seabird’s Cry’

Iteag sa Chuan (ee-tch-ack sa ch-oo-an)