Field of Mars Reserve
- Najika Akane
- Aug 12
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 5
Prologue: Seeking and Seeing
Inspiration from possibility
I came for the myzomela.
Or maybe just the idea of it—the bright flicker, the curated stillness, the clean birdwatcher’s narrative: “I sought, I saw, I listed.” That neat transaction of time for sighting.
But the Field of Mars Reserve had recently been visited by a storm, and it did not offer anything neat.
The path that had once meandered softly now cracked and folded under the weight of downed trees. Roots like ribs, branches like barricades. It was not a park so much as a body in recovery. The air smelled of splinters and sap, of something trying to heal.
The myzomela didn’t appear. It never does when you bring expectation in both hands.
What appeared instead was everything else.
At the time, I was in-between rental inspections, in-between borrowed lounges and packing boxes, measuring cupboards in centimetres and commute times in minutes. I would step into strangers’ living rooms and try to picture my shoes by their door. I was looking for shelter, for softness, for a little kitchen light that felt like it belonged to me. I was trying to build a life from silhouettes, from the imagined weight of future routines.
The reserve, too, felt caught mid-transition. It mirrored the sensation of moving—how homes fall apart just before they’re built again. Paths blocked, trees felled and cautioned off, desire lines vanished under bark and mud. Some places had been cleared, others left to the improvisations of birds and wind. It was chaotic, reluctant to settle. The kind of place where something had happened and was still happening.
I wandered through it like a person searching for a door.
I had come for one thing, and found instead a fellowship of obstacles. Tangled roots like thoughts refusing to lie flat. Fallen branches like reminders of all the things you cannot lift on your own. The storm had rewritten the Reserve in the same way life sometimes rewrites your sense of stability: suddenly, forcefully, and without asking.
And yet, beneath the rawness and ruin, something quieter had already begun. A reassembling. Not restoration, not yet—but the very beginning of it. That aching, invisible work of returning.
I – A Forest Rearranged
Anchors and Lures
The trees hadn’t resisted the storm.
Resistance felt like too human a word—full of will, of narrative. The trees simply yielded. They fell with a kind of grace, as if the storm had asked and they’d nodded in reply. Now they lay across the path like forgotten scaffolds, their limbs angled with the elegance of collapsed bridges. Not ruin, exactly. Just rearrangement.
To walk here was to pass through an architecture undone. Bark peeled back in wide, curling strips—not rot, but some slow molting. A trunk lay split clean down the middle, its insides exposed like something halfway between vulnerability and blueprint. I stepped over it carefully, not for fear of falling, but as though crossing a boundary I hadn’t been invited to.
And then—just as I passed beneath a low branch, my eye caught movement across the water. A quick, gliding motion. Almost invisible, but precise.
A water strider.
There was a moment of dissonance, then recognition. Not scientific—something older. Oh! The water-crossing insect. I had only seen it in Animal Crossing before, a neat little sprite skating over pixel ponds. And yet here it was, alive, lifting itself from the water’s surface like a thought that barely disturbed the world it moved through.
And it wasn’t alone.
There must have been fifty, maybe sixty of them—dotting the creek’s surface like a constellation in motion. They moved independently, but somehow also together, each following its own line, pausing, darting, drifting. I stood there for a while just watching. There was a gentle rhythm to their presence, the quiet insistence of lives being lived in miniature.
I hadn’t come for them, but they stayed with me.
Still, I was here for the birds. For wings and song and flickers in the canopy. The skaters belonged to the surface, and my gaze kept lifting—toward branch and call and everything that might, in time, take flight.
II – Path Overgrown
Arrangements
Some paths welcome you. Others simply permit your passing.
This one did neither.
It barely qualified as a path at all—more a whisper of direction, a thread pulled loose at the forest’s edge. Overgrown, uninviting, hedged with the sort of doubt that settles in a house after too many unanswered letters. But I stepped off the trail anyway, led less by certainty than by a quiet insistence, unreasonable but sincere, that perhaps I would be tolerated.
Above me, the canopy closed like a book written in a dialect I couldn’t speak. The light came through in faint ribbons—not enough to see clearly, only enough to suggest that something else might be watching. Everything green here felt older. Not ancient in the romantic sense, but practical, enduring. Unbothered by my presence.
Ferns reached out with slow composure. Vines hung like forgotten questions. I walked with care—not from fear, but from a wish not to offend. Each footfall felt like an intrusion, a knock on a door I didn’t intend to open.
Eastern browns live here. Not possibly. Not potentially. They live here.
So I moved with the caution of someone in a borrowed room—alert, respectful, aware of the floorboards. Every snapped twig a declaration. Every displaced leaf a confession. The path asked nothing of me, but I felt, somehow, the need to earn each step.
Beside me, the creek followed—thin and constant, its murmur like someone speaking gently to themselves in another room. It wasn’t soothing, not exactly, but it was familiar in the way certain silences are when shared.
And then—
A butcherbird.
Still as sculpture, poised between branches. Its gaze touched me, not with fear, but something quieter—discernment, perhaps. As though it was weighing whether I could be left to my own devices. Its presence was not performative. It simply was, and I felt as though I’d stumbled into something that had begun long before I arrived and would continue well after I left.
Its song, when it came, was clear and fluted. A sound that didn’t ask to be admired. Just heard. But it was not the melody that defined it.
They are not named for music.
They are named for what comes after.
For how they hang their prey—on thorns, on twigs. For how they build larders from absence. Altars from what has been taken.
And I thought: I do that too.
Not with beetles or lizards. But with memories. With phrases left unsaid, with feelings suspended in thought. I keep them sharp, sometimes even on purpose. Just to prove they were real. Just to remember what it cost to feel them.
The bird tilted its head once more, then disappeared—folding itself back into the green with a grace that needed no witness. Not abrupt, not theatrical. Just… gone.
And the silence it left behind wasn’t empty.
It was listening.
I turned back then, still wary of snakes, still ducking vines, still uncertain of where the path began or ended. But I felt steadier. As though something had seen me and chosen not to withdraw.
As though I had passed—if not a test, then at least a threshold.
III – A Kind of Magic
Whisperings
I don’t know why it should still feel extraordinary—to see a mammal, uncontained, living its life beside mine. But it does.
It feels… implausible.
The birds I expect. They’ve made a kind of truce with human presence, living above or around us, darting in and out of visibility like footnotes in the day. But marsupials—wallabies, possums—carry the weight of something more fragile. More sacred. As though they belong to a different version of the world, one that continues whether or not we remember to look for it.
I saw two swamp wallabies in a clearing, not thirty paces from the path. They were simply there, nibbling and adjusting, their large eyes soft with awareness. They didn’t flee, which somehow made the moment more unreal. They acknowledged me—gently, and without fear—as if I were some passing breeze, worth noticing but not fearing. I wanted to thank them, though for what, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps for not disappearing. For letting me see them as they are.
They moved like language I couldn’t quite read—fluid, compact, self-assured. I thought of how often I’d walked through this city believing these animals to be elsewhere, out in the “wild,” far from roads and roofs. But they were here all along, folded into the bush like a secret.
Later, I saw a ring-tailed possum curled in the crook of a tree, in full daylight. I thought I was mistaken. But it didn’t blink, didn’t vanish. It stayed. Its fur caught the light in a way that felt domestic—like a coat draped over a chair. Its ringed tail wrapped around the branch with gentle finality, as if to say: This is enough. This branch, this hour, this patch of stillness.
There was something unbearably tender about it.
I stayed longer than I should have. A part of me feared that if I looked away, it would un-happen. That the forest would correct itself, as dreams do when they grow self-aware.
Seeing them here—alive and so close—felt like overhearing something personal. Something not meant for me, but offered all the same. It was dazzling in the truest sense: it made the world tilt. The neatness of suburb and street and rental inspections blurred at the edges. For a moment, I was elsewhere.
And perhaps that’s the real astonishment—not that they exist, but that they let us live beside them. That despite everything we’ve broken, something still looks back at us and does not run.
IV – The Spiral
Cork
There are birds you know in outline, in passing. Blurs at the corner of a walk. Names you can recall, even imitate poorly, but which remain sketches in the mind. And then—one day—they show themselves.
And that changes everything.
I had seen White-throated Treecreepers before, technically. Movement flickering across bark, the hint of rusted wing, the call that loops like a falling spring. But this was the first time the bird stayed. The first time it danced a full phrase in my field of vision. And I understood, suddenly, why people speak of such things with reverence.
It began halfway up the trunk, small and alert, its white throat catching just enough filtered light to shine. Then—without haste—it began its ascent.
Not directly. But in spirals.
It moved in a slow, deliberate corkscrew, tracing the tree’s spine like a story unwinding. Pausing, tapping, searching—its claws finding bark as though retracing steps from memory. I stood very still, breath shallow, afraid even a shift in posture might cause the moment to blur back into chance.
There was something exquisite in its precision. The way it knew the tree. Not abstractly, not as landscape—but as home, as text. Reading it inch by inch with feet and beak, deciphering clues I could never hope to recognise.
It was not a display. And yet, it was the most beautiful performance I’d seen in days.
The longer I watched, the more it felt like the forest was not a backdrop, but a stage with one actor—unconcerned by audience, motivated only by its own quiet logic of hunger and rhythm. The world narrowed to one trunk, one movement, one spiral threaded upwards.
Eventually, it slipped around to the far side of the tree and disappeared—leaving only a strange sense of having been shown something personal. Something intimate, but not confessional. It had not performed for me. I had simply been still enough, lucky enough, to see.
Observation Record-Field Notes:
Species: White-throated treecreeper
Date: 3rd May 2025
Time: 1:42 PM
Location: Field of Mars Reserve, NSW
Coordinates: -33.8147, 151.1316
Habitat: Dense valley woodland, coast banksia
Behaviour: Foraged alone, climbing vertically up atrunk in short hops. Probed bark for insects using bill, supported by stiff tail. Calm, focused behaviour.
Weather Conditions: Overcast, 17°C- 21°C
Observer: Najika
V- Storm
Growth
The aftermath of a storm is not silence—it is rearrangement.
Some birds vanish in the noise. Some emerge in the hush that follows.
I found myself ducking under half-suspended trunks, walking trails that ended in roots. But even those endings had songs. Brown thornbills darted through the mess like scribbled notes. A grey fantail flicked and fanned and rewrote the space with its tail.
Everything was scattered. Nothing was gone.
And maybe that’s the lesson: the forest doesn’t rebuild. It continues.
Even beauty doesn’t wait for the world to be tidy.
Epilogue: The Leaving Was Quiet
Parting words
By the time I turned back, the myzomela had not appeared. Maybe it had been there the whole time, somewhere above, flitting just out of my insistence.
It didn’t matter.
The white-throated treecreeper had made its quiet loop.
The rose robins had held stillness like breath.
The forest had spoken—not in sightings, but in presences. In pauses.
I came for a bird. I left with the afterimage of a storm, the hush of wingbeats, the understanding that sometimes, you find more by not looking.
Birds Seen at Field of Mars Reserve – 3rd May 2025
A non-exhaustive list of companions, glimpsed and remembered:
• Rose Robin (Petroica rosea) — singular male • Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa) — numerous, tireless, everywhere • Superb Fairywren (Malurus cyaneus) — scattered, blue sparks • White-throated Treecreeper (Cormobates leucophaea)
• Eastern Spinebill (Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris)
• Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus)
• Brown Thornbill (Acanthiza pusilla)
