Bruny Youth Story Prize

We survive evermore, evermore.

It is a rolling trail of scuffing tar on which I live by flail, and panic at wing. This has long allowed me skill in avoiding those land ebbing machines - leaving behind grey hilled feasts. The meaty sustenance those rumbling metal heaps had slaughtered.

And with murder I cry – but am nurtured. Energetic at the wiry clad flesh of our mammal neighbours. Slain by short, persistent squeals and the abruptness of rubber, screeching. A sky of eye branding white as they die on collision.

My crop is full, and I keep dodging. Waiting for more. Seething for the fibres to snap as I balance upon this fine line. And sometimes, we do find it’s us next, indeed. But I continue.

I must.

This is my adaption to survival - to teeter on the edge. No good at the job would we be otherwise; a quick predator at sky and ground, taking career as the eagle in its dwindling. To strike at the small living and dead alike.

Important it is. The currawong prosper as eagle - and too, in our ambition of pertaining to the likeness of those diminished 'swift parrot'. With its brief warnings of yellow we hold similar. Eye to feather - us currawong are a different bird, yet we both hold the sun on our light-boned bodies.

The drain dumped corpses, rotted at time's vehemence, and any fresh matted sinew, allows our matt-black a shine in a distant blessing of star. Our omens are that of ravens and crows, yet we do not encroach upon lands with our black feather. We adapt to those who encroach on us – and this island.

Due at any point of disturbance committed, the might of the wedge-tailed has long scuttered and abandoned the nests of their new generation, while those supposed "swift one's" as well, have had their long-mapped trails and grounds ripped away with the downing of that sky winding flora. Threat of the mammal, threat of the avian. Yet us black currawong, have taken chance, and found persistence to long survive by keeping under the rule of those new men. Audacious and negligent as they are.

As threatening as they will be.

But so. The bowl of our brown-twigged hut is rebuilt for the season over. We mimic the lost. We face the bullying of the beast that feeds us.

Our small vengeance is in the way our caw can haunt the man. It moves in a triple fall; it rings up and down in a bowing arch of thin wood, it reigns over a moist forest's cap. Annoyance at our presence festering up in the man. Temples shivering. It is reputation gained.

But even so this pleasantry exists, it was never a mutual hunt of one another. Our call is but a bird's, their call - decides who lives, and then who must die. We the predator, the new common sight. This new man, the decider.

And thus - we scream, evermore, evermore.

Winners of the Bruny Youth Story Prize will be announced at The Bruny Island Bird Festival on Sunday, the 22nd of March at 12 pm in the Adventure Bay hall. This prize is proudly brought to you by The Bruny Kids and Nature Project, led by Claire Boost and the Tasmanian Community Fund.