Thursday, September 20, 2018

Spring Starting Outside the Door

First to set the scene for spring some music composed by Edvard Grieg, "Peer Gynt - Morning Mood".  I was also thinking of Vivaldi's Four Seasons but Morning Mood is softer & more in turn with a NZ soft spring light, flowers unfurling & bees bobbing between them.  While Vivaldi is quite heavy with very sharp contrasting sections, (definitely not suiting the hyperacusis from hubby's brain injury and me still a bit migrainy).

Outside our door is a native kowhai tree with beautiful yellow drop flowers, pea like seed pods and tuis, NZ native honeyeater birds, fighting over who can claim the tree.  A classic NZ scene of the tui singing in the kowhais in spring.  Tuis also enjoy other nectar trees so the red flowering pohutukawa, (often a symbol of NZ Christmas summer), and the flax with large red flowers often also have a tui come by.  They are an aggressive bird when nesting, even known for bringing down hawks & magpies for flying too close during nesting season.  Hence they can crowd out other native species when they have no serious competition.  So in many areas across NZ you will be able to hear a tui sing when you come by the trees they enjoy.  Hubby can sit and hear the tuis in the trees on the fence line and watch them shoot past on a patrol of the area & heading to the Kowhai to drink the nectar.

When there is more than one tui in the tree the rival visitor is at least given a warning to get out and 'find its own f'in tree'.  The tui who claimed the tree will puff up and 'try to make himself look big', (like the cat from Red Dwarf).  Often this will turn the tui from a sleek bird to a very angry puff ball three times the size.  If the warning is not enough an aerial fight is on.


Once the interloper leaves the successful tui reduces the puffed feathers to about half, and with a chest proudly thrust forward & his white bib held high sings his success.  After a champion sings they usually reduce the puff out of their feathers back to the sleek form and resume feeding.

Tui have two voice boxes, syrinxes, so they perform a variety of noises & songs which can vary widly from chirps & creaks to lyrical calls & high pitch trills.  In the bush they bring a ghostly atmosphere as they sound quite unlike the other birds.  The department of conservation have provided some lovely captures of their voices in the bush.  They are open to listen to and free to the public to download, (the more who experience the tui song the better for NZ tuis).  The first is of a male calling out across his territory, some of the more ghostly sounds & more commonly recognised, while the second is a collection of varied communication calls: croaks, whistles, chirps, creaks, trills, waughus (not a real word I know but an approximation) etc.

When signs of spring come by it is nice to see them by the door so when things get too wobbly & painful there is something not too far away to look at & relax.  The sound of the tuis is a million times better than suburban guys who are mowing a 4sqm patch of grass on their fence line every week.  Hubby has no trouble with the birds and that is perhaps because we enjoyed the bush & outdoors so much that we are so accustomed to them.

Due to the concussion injury the loud sounds of the neighbours and tradesmen cause hubby no end of grief & frustration.  When I have a bad migraine I can understand, where hyperacusis makes loud sounds & certain frequencies quite painful.  There are recordings of the birds, (along with other acoustic atmospheric music tracks e.g. rain, waves), which help to play on headphones to counteract the more painful sounds, along with noise reduction headphones and earplugs.  We often cannot entirely remove the source of the painful sounds or remove ourselves from them so building a tolerance, breathing exercises, sensory modulation and in the worse cases medication helps.

I say this as I had an exceptionally painful migraine lasting a couple of days recently; making me unable to stand, sit, read, blurred vision especially on one side, lots of sharp & throbbing pain along with very painful hyperacusis, even extreme nausea.  Often when I come out from a migraine there is a weird feeling almost as if you woke up after passing out in a seizure for a long time and your mind is not quite grounded & partially trapped still in a dream like haze.  The world has a light and odd atmospheric quality.  About to take flight or stumble & fall in an attempt like a baby bird.  Certainly Edvard Grieg's Morning Mood suits but hubby finds the following song Learning to Fly closer to his heart and I can understand why.  We both listened to Pink Floyd in the womb so to speak and certainly when growing up.  For him the poetry of this song is what he often feels. It captures for both of us feelings with chronic illness quite well.  Certainly for this post we were grounded inside looking at spring arriving outside, but in our minds we flew.


Into the distance a ribbon of black
Stretched to the point of no turning back
A flight of fancy on a windswept field
Standing alone my senses reeled
A fatal attraction is holding me fast how
How can I escape this irresistible grasp?

Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue tied and twisted just an earth bound misfit, I

Ice is forming on the tips of my wings
Unheeded warnings I thought I thought of everything
No navigator to find my way home
Unladened, empty and turned to stone

A soul in tension that's learning to fly
Condition grounded but determined to try
Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I

Above the planet on a wing and a prayer,
My grubby halo, a vapor trail in the empty air,
Across the clouds I see my shadow fly
Out of the corner of my watering eye
A dream unthreatened by the morning light
Could blow this soul right through the roof of the night

There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, a state of bliss
Can't keep my mind from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I

No comments:

Post a Comment