Winter birds
As the year moves into the cooler months in Australia, I was reminded of an image of a dead bird that I took on a cold winter's day last year. I stood below an apple tree and admired a flock of little yellow-winged birds flit between the tree's bare branches. There was a bitter chill in the air and I recall feeling a sense of emptiness and loss as the birds were the only sign of life I had hitherto had contact with that day. I then looked to my feet to find a lifeless bird that had been separated from its flock and succumbed to the harshness of winter.
I recently looked at Margaret Tait's 1974 16mm film Aerial and loved the airy way in which she captured the elements of a Scottish winter. Images include grass blowing in the wind, soil being turned over, and blackbirds flying from a snowy tree branch to Tait's window. There's a hushed-ness, a sense of looking out at the world from the cosy confines of a living room window, with a fire providing warmth in the background. The winter meanwhile slogs along through the heavy cover of snow and mud. Winter's harshness is felt most deeply in an image of a dead bird: one of the birds previously seen at the window. Its been returned to the earth, its feathers blowing in the wind like blades of grass.
The birds I came across on that winter's day... in both life and death:
