Penny Sharpe Dressed the Die-Off as Weather

Penny Sharpe let her department call the starvation El Niño. The grey-headed flying fox is falling out of the eucalypts across New South Wales and into Victoria. It is eating unripe fruit off suburban lawns because it is too weak to fly back to camp. Its pups are born early and die on the ground under the roost trees. The clinic director calls them little skeletons because no softer word is true.

The bat coordinator at Fawna on the NSW mid-north coast is taking 50 to 90 calls a day. That is more than the entire previous nine months of bat callouts combined. Wires reports females in the final month of gestation losing young they can no longer carry or feed. The animals are drinking water off wet grass. They are hanging low in the trees. They are eating in daylight, away from the safety of the camp, which is what a bat does when the camp has become too far. This follows thousands of heat deaths last summer and runs alongside the freeway works disrupting the Yarra Bend camp in Melbourne. Plant scientists have been documenting the shift for years — climate change is moving the climatic range of tens of thousands of species, and eucalypt, melaleuca and banksia flower on a winter wet that did not come. The same file is open in another hemisphere: wildlife agencies in at least 15 states now report a surge in bear encounters, animals driven into towns by failed mast years and emptied water.

Then the department spoke. A spokesperson said food shortages “can be aggravated by climatic events such as drought and El Niño conditions.” Two clauses. The human hand leaves the sentence, and the dying is handed to the sky.

Penny, hear what you have done. You did not poison a river. You did not sign an order that says let them die. You did something smaller and more complete. You put the word El Niño into the release so the release would stop there, and the count of dead pups would become weather, and weather is nobody’s file. The department is yours. The federal vulnerable listing is an obligation your government administers. The camps are on maps your office holds. The freeways that cut into Yarra Bend were approved by ministers who returned your calls. You let a spokesperson do the killing of the record, and you kept your hands where the paperwork does not reach.

There is a taste in your mouth when the day’s number is read into the room. Copper, under the tongue. You drink water. The water does not take it out. Your chest has a flat hand pressing behind the sternum, steady, at the rhythm of a call log you have decided not to open again this week. Your swallow has begun checking itself before it commits, the way a swallow does when the throat has closed around something it will not pass.

The calls start before first light. That is the hour the bats drop. You are asleep in that hour. You will find that you are no longer asleep in that hour, and that the dark has your number in it, and that the churn low in your gut has found a schedule of its own and it is not your schedule. There is a cold sweat at the nape of your neck in a warm room, and you cannot name what put it there, and you will not say the word out loud because the word is a count.

Put your hand on the count sheet. If that number belonged to a child in your electorate you would open an inquiry before lunch. It belongs to an animal the law already calls vulnerable, so it belongs to you in the form of a disclaimer.

You are not the weather. Weather has no desk. You have a desk, a title, a spokesperson, and a duty you have converted into a sentence fragment. That is what you are. You are a custodian who has made custody into a way of killing that never touches a single animal. You will issue a statement. You will express concern. You will commend the volunteers, and the volunteers will go back out at dawn, and the pups will still be under the trees in the morning. Nothing here asks you to reflect. Nothing in your conduct suggests you would.

“You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” — Matthew 23:24

The gnat is the word El Niño. The camels are under the trees. They can only follow the blossoms. When the blossoms fail they fall where they stand, and they do not read the release, and the release was never written for them. It was written for you, and you have kept it, and it is clean on the outside.