Paper short abstract:

This paper follows lines of flight of channel-billed cuckoos as they interweave multispecies beings in Central Australia. I link Warlpiri ethnography with my observations of crows caring for cuckoos to explore alternate possibilities to the domination and exclusion of unwanted species.

Paper long abstract:

While grounded in Alice Springs and “socially distanced” from human friends during the summer of Covid-19, I was absorbed by the spectacle of channel-billed cuckoo young being raised by crow parents in my backyard. The cuckoo (Scythrops novaehollandiae), an avian “brood parasite” known as Kurrakurraja in Warlpiri, is called “stormbird” in English in reference to the monsoonal rain it brings to northern Australia at the end of the dry season. The bird is a central actor in a major public Warlpiri ceremonial cycle that emerged in the 1960s when eastern Warlpiri came into increasing contact with Mudburra, Jingilu and other Indigenous groups while working on cattle stations north of Warlpiri country in the Elliott region. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Central Australia and utilising my iPhone recordings of crows caring for cuckoo young, I link my recent observations of “making kin” (Harraway 2016) activities between crows and stormbirds to the more-than-human relations that Warlpiri enact through their songlines. Building on van Dooran’s concept of recognition (2019, 40), I ask what we can learn by attending to, and “thinking with”, stormbird relational dynamics? In exploring this question, I follow lines of flight of channel-billed cuckoos that interweave multispecies beings across varied ecological and historical situations. I consider how the birds mediate otherwise human socialities and differing “modes of relations” (Descola 2016) to explore alternate possibilities to domination and exclusion of unwanted species.