Fledglings

THE WEEK MY DAUGHTER FINISHES high school, I find a blackbird’s nest in a raised garden bed in our Melbourne backyard. Sheltered by late-season broad beans, the deft straw cup contains four speckled-blue eggs. The mama bird, disturbed by the harvesting, flies off. I convince my partner to leave a few broad bean stalks in place to shelter the nest. He rips out the rest, tops up the compost and mulches in tomato seedlings. Mama bird returns once the planting is done and sits for hours on end over her precious clutch.

I read up on the nesting habits of blackbirds. The eggs will take two to three weeks to hatch. The tiny hatchlings will be blind and featherless at first, confined to the nest – they’re known at this stage as nestlings.

Our daughter is a nestling, an only child who has spent a significant amount of time at home with her parents, due in part to Covid lockdowns, in part to her tendency as a homebody. We enrol her at the local high school, a school with a uniform, walking distance from our home, to be close to her peers – elements of my own schooling that I’d enjoyed and want her to enjoy, too.

Once they outgrow the nestling stage, baby blackbirds develop into fledglings, testing their wings while still staying close to the nest. Our daughter has other plans.

In Year 10, she successfully auditions for a specialist arts school to study drama and theatre. The school commute requires her to rise with the birds. Her new friends live all over the state – Frankston, Mernda, Barwon Heads – and there’s no uniform. Six months into her final year of high school, she sets her sights on film directing and producing. Highly pragmatic with a strong work ethic, she clocks that the Gold Coast is the centre of filmmaking in Australia and applies for graduate school in Brisbane. She gets an early offer from Griffith University.

In early December, she takes her first solo flight to Queensland to spend schoolies on Stradbroke Island with a group of close friends, several of whom have been accepted into an acting course in Brisbane. I’d anticipated that she would take a gap year in 2024 and travel overseas, as I did at her age, and I’d made plans on the assumption that we’d meet up in Europe, travel together as I’d done with my mother, making memories to last a lifetime.