Global Worming (or Bell Minor Associated Dieback)

“Tink, Tink” go the birds in the trees. “Tink, Tink.” It is as if the trees were filled with people clinking spoons against wine glasses. There are no other bird noises in the bush, save the occasional startling crack of the whipbird.

These birds, the bell minors, are farmers. They wake up with the sunrise every morning to begin their toil amongst the treetops, where their crops thrive. They call to one another constantly throughout the day, tinking in the language of tiny iridescent green birds.

This eucalypt grove they occupy serves as their farm. It is filled with delicious psyllids, tiny insects that grow plentiful in the eucalypti’s aromatic resin. They are the bellbird‘s chief source of food. You can see them there at all times, sitting, comfortably full, all along the eucalypt grove, tinking.

Other birds entering the grove will be bombarded, and forced out. In this way the psyllids are raised, protected, and harvested. And as the crop becomes more plentiful, and the birds grow healthier and better able to protect their land, the eucalypt grove quickly dies. Diseased by a pestilence, raised by an intelligent bird.

And as you enter the grove, and the all encompassing noise of their tinking pervades you, you look up at them, resting aloft on their eucalypts. Their green feathers are set apart from the green of the canopy only by their shimmering reflection of the sunlight that illuminates them. And you watch as the sunlight filters downward through the canopy, downward from a pale sky, which grows ever more deathly pale as it slowly fills with carbon.