content warning: animal cruelty and death

Uncle Ditch’s whole mad enterprise started with one dead cockatoo which he found out on the nature strip one bin night. The thing was snowy and perfect. Not a single feather out of place, wrinkly lids half-closed over beady eyes, beak ajar. Like it was stuck in the moment of going to sleep, Ditch said.

We all heard the story a hundred million times. Ditch brings in the bird, cradling it like a baby, and with an actual friggin’ tear on his cheek.
He walks past Aunty Anne who says, what the hell are you doing, bringing a filthy thing like that in the house?
Bringing it back to life, Annie, bringing it back to life.
Then she does her eyebrow-raise-inhalation-through-the-teeth combo, which means something like, oh here we go...

But Ditch had already had his epiphany out there under the streetlight, with one elbow on the handle of the general waste bin. There would be no telling him.

Uncle Ditch was a clockmaker. He repaired antiques: grandfathers, cuckoos, and the occasional pocket watch. But there were only so many clocks to repair in a town as small as ours. Ditch relied on Anne’s income from her real estate job, and busied himself with building windup toys for us kids and birdwatching in the hinterland. He loved his birds and he loved his clocks, so it was hardly surprising when he announced his new scheme to bring the two together.

Mum said, it’s like that Bates guy in the Hitchcock film, all this dead bird stuff. You’re not turning psycho on us, are ya Ditchy?

Ditch just shook his head and smiled, as if Mum was still the little sister whose hair you mussed up when she asked silly questions.

We didn’t visit the house up on Gardiner Avenue much. There had always been a sense that Ditch wasn’t just a black sheep but something else entirely. Something more odd. A newt, Dad would say to Mum, he’s the black newt of your family, love.
This new venture seemed the last straw for them and dropping by ceased altogether.

Ten-year-olds can be curious creatures though. Despite the family distancing, I would often go round after school to sit in the back room and suck on homemade grapefruit icy poles as my uncle worked. All afternoon, Ditch would squint through his buggy-looking eyepiece and deliver long, improvised lectures on ornithology and climate change.

You know kiddo, Ditch said with his scalpel inside a defrosted wattlebird, we’re undergoing the sixth mass extinction event. One day, this’ll be gone. He gestured out the window toward what I thought to be the back garden. The apricot trees, the bird bath, the compost, the slanted pickets of the back fence.

But now I understand the sweep of his hand was moving in a greater arc. The stand of lemon-scented gums beyond the fence, the glades of southern beech and lilly pilly, the slopes of ragged sword grasses that slit your fingers worse than paper cuts, then the twisting gullies of fern trees that went down the coastline where lemonade bushes grew thick on the headlands, and screw pines stood like punkish soldiers on the beach. Uncle Ditch’s bloody fingers passed over all of it while his voice matter-of-factly proclaimed its doom.

Not before too long, Ditch started accepting donations for his work, with the caveat that the birds had to have died of natural causes. He rejected most roadkill, on account of the visible damage. It was the smaller ones that proved the most challenging; the fairy wrens and thornbills requiring minute parts, cogs and springs so tiny you could lose them to a slight draft.

One time a trucker brought an emu. Ditch sidelined all other projects because the massive thing wouldn’t fit in the freezer. When it was done, he set it to strutting a course up and down the hallway.

Four years of it and Aunty Anne’s patience gave out. The kookaburras in the living room went off at unexpected hours of the night, and the thump of the emu’s feet on the floorboards began to sound like insanity itself creeping up the corridor. She found fantails floating in the sink when she went to do the dishes. And if she listened hard enough, she could hear the faint ticking that went on inside every one of their unnatural little chests.

So when her eyebrows could be raised no higher and her teeth could be gritted no harder, she left.

Ditch somehow won half of Aunty Anne’s money in the divorce settlement, which he spent on purchasing carbon fibre; light enough to make his birds take flight. The windows of every room had to be boarded over from the inside after that so that the birds would stop smashing through them.

Throughout my teenage years, the house on Gardiner Avenue became louder and louder while the forests around town became quieter. Summers brought bushfires ever closer, and each spring another colour was missing from the wildflower tapestry of the heathland. The incoming tide of bird corpses slowed and ground to a halt. The last to arrive was a magpie-lark found caught in the grille of a Subaru Forester. The 386th bird.

Ditch hand-painted a sign which read The Clockwork Ark, hung it above his door, and started charging people a few bucks to look at all his creations. Neighbours brought their children, who had never seen or heard of half the birds. They oohed and aahed and said things like, goodness me so lifelike! or, oh look, isn’t that one beautiful!

And in a way, they were. Ditch’s wrens hopped daintily along the mantelpiece. Currawongs stared daggers at you through yellow glass eyes. The old white cocky tilted his head this way, then that, regarding visitors with an inquisitive side-eye.

But at night, with the darkness fluttering and ticking all around him, Uncle Ditch wept because he knew that even with a whole lifetime of tinkering, he would never get them quite right.