Royal National Park
- Najika Akane
- Aug 16, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Prologue: A Soft Launch into Quiet
This was my third time moving since arriving in Sydney.
I’ve never had help. Not once. Each move has been an act of quiet endurance—lugging boxes alone, learning new bus routes, pretending that impermanence doesn’t bruise. There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being unseen, but from being the only one to witness your own exhaustion.
For months, I’d been tucked away in the bedroom of a shared apartment in the city’s centre—surrounded by scaffolding, sirens, and lives lived too closely beside mine, but never with me. The noise was constant. The walls too thin. I felt like a signal stretched between towers—broadcasting, but never quite reaching anyone.
I was unraveling.
The day I visited Royal National Park was the day before my big move. That morning, I had barely slept—tossing in the heat of my boxed-up room, thoughts racing, limbs aching. I kept rehearsing every possible thing that could go wrong: the keys not working, the internet not connecting, the sleazy agent who was already finding excuses not to return my bond. That weight followed me everywhere, even into my dreams.
I didn’t know it yet, but the forest was already opening.
There was no grand gate. No cinematic entrance. Just trees that quietly stepped back. The hush of river beside trail. Air that didn’t press in. I felt the tension give. Like the moment after you exhale but before you remember to breathe in again.
I wasn’t yet living by the sea. But for a moment, I was in something close. The rehearsal for stillness.
I –When the Network Falls Away
In the city, I had been surrounded by people but rarely seen. Conversations spilled through walls, footsteps echoed overhead — lives brushing mine without ever touching. I moved through shared kitchens like a ghost, learning to make myself small in other people’s routines. Even online, even wired in, I felt like a broadcast never quite reaching its receiver.
That morning, my phone had lost signal the moment I stepped onto the trail. Not just 4G flickering or a sluggish map — gone. The screen blinked SOS and stayed there, quietly untethered. It should’ve made me anxious. Instead, it felt like slipping beneath the surface of something older. A world not built for constant reachability. A silence that didn’t mean absence — just space.
I had forgotten what it felt like to arrive in a moment at the same time as someone else.
It began as a rustle. Barely more than a breath across the undergrowth — the kind of sound that could have been anything: wind, leaf-shift, the imagined twitch of something unseen. But the group paused. Someone turned. A hand rose, silent and certain. The others followed.
Binoculars lifted, not with urgency, but with the kind of hope that comes from learning how to wait.
And there — low to the ground, threading through leaf litter with careful, deliberate motion — was a Green Catbird.
Emerald, secretive, wholly real.
We all saw it. Together. Not a blur to be debated later, not a maybe shaped by hope. It moved in full presence — a realness that asked nothing, declared nothing. It simply was.
The moment held. No one spoke above a murmur. Smiles passed between strangers like offerings. There was something ceremonial in the quiet. I had imagined catbirds by their voices — those eerie, baby-like wails that echo from nowhere. But this one was silent. Grounded. Moving slowly through the debris of last week’s storms like it belonged there. Like it had always been part of the aftermath.
Later, we saw it again — higher now, poised in a soft net of canopy light. Its body still. Its eyes slow-blinking. It looked not at us, but through.
Its green shimmered with just enough irregularity to confuse the eye — a bird caught between camouflage and apparition. If I had seen it alone, I might have doubted it. But the group’s hush anchored the moment. We had all seen it. Fully.
There’s a kind of solace in being still enough to see what doesn’t hide — just exists quietly until someone looks long enough.
II – The Thread That Returns
The path had curved out of view. The group was stretched thin along the trail now — some ahead, some lingering. The forest felt quieter here. Denser. The kind of quiet that presses gently at the edges of your hearing, waiting to be filled.
I had started walking more slowly, letting the hush settle over me like a second skin. The trees leaned in, not menacingly, just close enough to make me aware of my own volume. Boots, breath, heartbeat.
And then — a sound.
Faint. Rising, then tapering into stillness. A soft, descending trill that landed somewhere behind my ribs.
The Fan-tailed Cuckoo.
I stopped. It was the call I had been chasing for months. Sweet and aching — like something said once, too honestly, and never repeated.
I’d developed a quiet obsession with cuckoos — not just for their voices, but for their stories. The cruelty they’re famous for. Or the strategy. Depending on who’s telling it. They lay their eggs in another’s nest. Leave their young to be raised by strangers. No nurturing. No apology. Just survival, honed to a point.
It should seem monstrous.
But it doesn’t. It feels old. Ancestral. A kind of intelligence that exists outside our need for narrative.
And then — movement.
A flicker on a horizontal branch, mid-canopy. Grey, soft-edged. The golden eye-ring catching light like a held breath. It didn’t sing again. It didn’t need to.
The thread I had followed — across weeks of searching apps, listening to audio clips, squinting at treetops — returned to my hand. Not neatly. Not with a bow. Just enough to know the line had held.
III – Lyrebird and the Flicker
We heard it before we saw it — not a single call, but a collage.
A whipbird’s crack. The cry of a currawong stretched thin. The click of a shutter. Even the hush-click of a phone on silent. None of it quite right, and yet all of it real. The forest was speaking in echoes — a language built from borrowed sound.
Then — movement.
A Superb Lyrebird. He stepped from shadow into the undergrowth, tail trailing like a question, body half-blurred by rain. He scratched deliberately at the soil, each motion practiced, grounded, patient. It didn’t feel like performance. It felt like something older — excavation, not display.
Observation Record–Field Notes:
Species: Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae)
Date: 10 May 2025
Time: 11:36pm
Location: Lady Carrington Drive, Royal National Park, NSW
Coordinates: -34.0993, 151.0490
Habitat: Moist sclerophyll forest with dense understory, near shaded riverbanks
Behaviour: Pair seen foraging on forest floor—scratching soil slowly and with focus. Mimicry followed foraging session, including calls of Eastern Whipbird, Currawong, and synthetic sounds (camera shutter, electronic beeps). A third bird observed trailing a Yellow-throated Scrubwren, opportunistically feeding in disturbed soil.
Weather Conditions: Overcast and humid; still air under thick canopy cover; mild light filtering through leaf layers
Observer: Najika
I whispered his name. The others turned. Silence moved through the group like breath drawn in.
Then a second bird appeared. Smaller, slighter — the female. She lingered behind, not passive, but observant. Like she was there to witness, not just to echo.
And then — something else. A flicker, low to the ground. Darting in the wake of the male’s careful disruption came a Yellow-throated Scrubwren. Small, vivid, quick-footed. It dipped into the turned soil, seizing the moment without hesitation.
It wasn’t an accident. It was accompaniment.
The scrubwren didn’t mimic. It didn’t perform. It didn’t need to. It followed quietly, doing its work beside the spectacle. Not noticed by most — not at first. But once seen, impossible to forget.
I hadn’t known I needed that.
The forest had given me grandeur — myth feathered and alive — but it also gave me something smaller. A presence that didn’t ask to be noticed, but allowed itself to be seen anyway.
I thought about how long I’d lived just outside of things — sharing walls, but not connection. How often I’d been the one trailing, quiet, not absent, just… unfelt. The scrubwren’s path felt familiar. Not lesser. Parallel.
Later, when the lyrebirds had worked the earth open, the male sang.
He didn’t rush. The mimicry came slowly, like recitation — a memory retrieved note by note. A whipbird. A currawong. A camera. A shutter. All of it offered back to the canopy with perfect, aching precision. Not as imitation. As evidence.
Not actors. Archivists.
And maybe I was becoming one too.
Not through mimicry, but through attention. Through the slow and reverent work of noticing. The flicker behind the lyric. The bird in the shadow of another. The silence that still carries shape.
IV – Stillness with Eyes Open
We had walked far by then.
The group had thinned into loose conversation, the hush of early wonder softened by distance. We were quieter now — not out of reverence, but fatigue. The kind that comes after too much beauty. The kind that asks for stillness.
Above us, perched on a bare limb, a Noisy Friarbird blinked slowly. Bald-headed and severe, it looked like an unfinished sketch — sharp in the wrong places, ancient in a way that felt almost theatrical. It didn’t move. It only watched.
And maybe that was the invitation.
Someone near the front stopped. Raised binoculars. Whispered. Then pointed.
“Powerful Owl.”
High above us, where the eucalypt branches tangle into sky, sat the male.
He didn’t perch — he inhabited. Heavy-bodied, shadow-folded, his form seemed carved into the crook of the tree, like the bark had grown around him. One eye half-lidded. Resting, but not unaware.
While everyone looked up, hushed and reverent, I kept scanning. Not searching for more — just letting my gaze settle wider. And then — a second shape.
Just above him. Broader. More alert.
The female.
She hadn’t been hiding. She had just been waiting for someone to look longer. Larger than the male, her form held a kind of purposeful stillness. Not aggressive. Not wary. Just sure. Of herself. Of the branch. Of us.
Powerful Owls are apex predators, mostly feeding on possums — ringtails, brushtails, even flying foxes. They’ve been known to swallow them whole, talons heavy with night.
But these two were empty-taloned. Resting. Watching.
They didn’t sing. They didn’t fly.
They simply were.
We all stood there, together. And none of us moved.
They weren’t performing. They weren’t dramatic. They just held the space — and in doing so, allowed us to hold it too.
V – The Ones Who Flickers
By then, we had seen the birds most people come for — the owls, the lyrebirds, the catbird.
But it was the smaller ones that stayed with me.
The quick silhouettes between branches. The flicker of movement just past your focus. The ones that didn’t pose, didn’t perform, but threaded themselves through the day like breath.
The honeyeaters — Lewin’s, Yellow-faced, New Holland — flickered across the canopy in loops of light and nectar. Their presence wasn’t rare, but it felt essential. Like punctuation the forest didn’t know it needed.
The Eastern Spinebill hovered near a flowering shrub for barely a moment — wings whirring, then gone. The Scarlet Myzomelas moved in arcs between shadows and bloom. Each one drew a line I couldn’t trace, but still wanted to follow.
The White-throated Treecreeper spiralled up a trunk nearby, its claws working methodically as if reading the story in the bark.
Even the Noisy Friarbird — absurd, prehistorically bald — had watched us from above with the kind of indifference that feels earned. As if to say: yes, I saw it too.
And the scrubwren. Tireless, attentive. Following giants. Carrying no song but its own motion. I think about it more than I expected.
they held the air between the names. They were what filled the gaps when the silence returned.
Epilogue: The Leaving is Not the End
Eventually, we had to leave.
Of course we did.
There was no trail marker that told us we were done. No final bird to close the day. Just the soft return to the gravel path, the shift in our pace, the shared fatigue. My phone still blinked SOS. The trail I’d followed in now stretched behind me, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if we were walking forward or back.
The group spread out again, looser now, like thread unspooling at the end of a weave. We joked. We stretched. Someone pointed at a banksia. The owls, the lyrebirds, the catbird—they were behind us now, but not gone. They stayed in our shoes, in our throats, in the soft reflex of looking up every time a leaf shifted.
Later, after I had returned to the noise of boxes and the ache of unpacking, someone in the group sent a message. A video.
Two Azure Kingfishers, barely visible across a bank of river. They were bowing to one another, slowly, rhythmically—a kind of courtship ritual not described in any book, not listed in any field guide. There was no term for what we were seeing. Just the footage. The moment. The mystery.
And I thought: this is why we do it.
Not just to identify. But to witness.
To become archivists of the unrecorded.
We are pattern-finders, yes. But we’re also something gentler.
We are the ones who stop. Who point. Who whisper: “Here. Look.”
Not because we need to be right. But because we know something real is happening—and it matters that someone sees it.
Birding is not just watching. It’s remembering.
It’s behaviour catalogued not by science alone, but by attention.
And maybe, one day, someone else will see two kingfishers bowing and know they’re not alone.
Maybe the trail they follow will lead them to something quiet and shimmering.
Maybe the forest will speak, and they’ll be listening.
Birds Seen at Royal National Park – 10th May 2025
A non-exhaustive list of companions, glimpsed and remembered:
• Green Catbird (Ailuroedus crassirostris) — 2, quiet and vivid, seen foraging low and perched high
• Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) — 2, mimicking forest calls, foraging side by side
• Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua) — 1 male, 1 female; motionless, commanding, roosting above trail
• Scarlet Myzomela (Myzomela sanguinolenta) — ~2–5, flickering between blossoms, bright and quick
• Fan-tailed Cuckoo (Cacomantis flabelliformis) — 1, calling mournfully, long-awaited sighting
• Brown Cuckoo-Dove (Macropygia phasianella) — 1, soft and slow, quietly slipping through trees
• White-throated Treecreeper (Cormobates leucophaea) — 1, spiralling a trunk with steady grace
• Yellow-throated Scrubwren (Neosericornis citreogularis) — 1, active, tossing leaves with confidence
• Noisy Friarbird (Philemon corniculatus) — 1, oddly composed, watching from above
