White Vented Crow : 無料・フリー素材/写真
White Vented Crow / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
|---|---|
| 説明 | White-Vented CrowAfter the execution, I walked out among the treesoblivious to danger. This, I shall not be includingin my journal. The youth had crept into a tentbelonging to the supply ship Charlotte, stolen a pound of sugar, and on his gibbet, confessedto other trifling thefts: an old offender, he said.One less mouth to feed – but his eyes were wideand frightened, his beard whiskerless, and stillI see the twitch of life going out of his thin legs.And now the branches, strung with blue-greyleaves, are filled with crows. They spill the airwith liquid songs the natives know as gurawaruŋ:lapping, welling outward, drowning the canopyin ebbs and surges of numinous sound. One fliesdown to a lower limb, strops his long black billand fixes me with an eye of sulphur – then he toosets to carolling. My hand touches my gun, thenwithdraws. Some other chance will present itself,and I shall shoot, skin, dissect, report, never mentionthat this day, fathoms deep in singing, I wishedto drown. Home by nightfall: the shocks of flogging,and that old, gaunt warning - a felon swinging. Poem by Giles Watson, 2014. Picture: ZM, Volume 2, 1815, Plate 86: ‘Noisy Crow’. ‘White-Vented Crow’ is the name given to the Pied Currawong by the surgeon John White in his Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales with sixty-five plates of non descript animals, birds, lizards, serpents, curious cones of trees and other natural productions, (1790), a book illustrated with a number of depictions of Australian native birds, which are observantly described, but without reference to their distinctive voices, of which the Pied Currawong’s is one of the most melodious, particularly when a whole flock are singing simultaneously. I have placed his encounter with these birds after the events described in his diary for 1st May 1788: “James Bennet, a youth, was executed for robbing a tent, belonging to the Charlotte transport, of sugar and some other articles. Before he was turned off he confessed his guilt, and acknowledged that, young as he was, he had been an old offender. Some other trifling thefts were brought before the court at the same time, and those concerned in them sentenced to receive corporeal punishment.” |
| 撮影日 | 2014-07-10 02:19:59 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
| 撮影地 |