I’m walking to Leichhardt along Crystal Street. There are two women in WIRES fluoro vests standing below a street tree. In the tree a possum is clinging. Broad daylight for a nocturnal animal must be frightening, perhaps terrifying. The women armed with a stick and banana are trying to coax the possum down.
It will come down when it’s dark, I say.
We want to assess its health, one replies.
Good luck! I think.
Further along, standing on Parramatta Road waiting to cross at the lights I hear a scrabbling above me. The shop is long term abandoned, everything grime covered but above the planks of timber are new and the strip of black flashing also. The scrabbling is inside this new ‘box’, probably pigeons enjoying the new housing.
There is no doubt pigeons enjoy the built environment. Is this why we dislike them so much? They thrive around us exploiting opportunity in our dereliction.
Waiting for a bus on New Canterbury Road a pigeon lands on the edge of the broken sign box above me. It settles down, eyes closed. When I get up to flag the bus it doesn’t fly away but flies up and disappears into the broken under-roofing space of the awning. I hear the squeaking of baby birds.
How tame are cats? How wild are cats? I stop this cat sitting at the bus stop in Lilyfiled, quite content to watch the people, the buses comes and go. How strange it is to see it sitting there as though it were waiting for its bus!
