I’m Feeling Twitchy, 2025
Jack Ellery

Written as an extension of Ellery’s project I’m Feeling Twitchy.

I wonder what I will learn tomorrow,
the birds dawn chorus a syballus.
What will tui teach me,
the flapping of the kereru will make me move.

I want to sing something about the birds and the wind blowing my hat away.

I'm getting better at whistling like tui.

Venetia Laura Delano Robertson’s The Beast Within ontologically locates the human through the more-than-human experiences, referencing the re-enchantment of the West seen in Therianthropy. Therianthropy sees an individual hold the belief that they are spiritually part or wholly animal, involving phantom shifts, emulations and experiences of a more-than-human — “their identity is fragmented and liminal” (Robertson 24).

I am unsure if I feel some animal remnants internally, or some connection on a higher animal being. Although, I do not feel concrete as a human, much like the writing of Therian Akhila, identity may be liminal, being both “myth and reality, both poetic and mundane, symbolical and raw, both feline and corvine… a trans-person and androgyne, not quite male nor female, a bit of everything, or completely other…. a spiritual and feral person… [crossing] a lot of different boundaries... I am a liminal creature… It resonates with the deepest, most primal and practical aspects of who I am.” (Robertson 23).

It is this liminality of identity, a constant exchange and flux and disappearance of grounding factors that I side with. I do not perform to find the animal within me, nor to find a male or female, I am interested in what it feels like to be a human, both in a physical and material sense, but also in a socially and culturally located way. In the performance that is my life I am treading through the liminality, I am becoming feral, queer, animalistic both through interior reflection and exterior more-than-human modification. I look to exercise a “variety of metaphysical beliefs and mystical animal archetypes invoked by the liminal yet hybrid status of the Therian” (Robertson 24).

Mum said the swirling river went out there last week,
now it follows the coast of kotare pocked banks.

There's a scratch in my solar plexus, from carcasses of seaweed, arms black and knotted, braiding into sharp sinews, I feel like a bird.

The birds are telling me a story before the trees were felled, the land burnt and the people shot. Before boats arrived with scots, before I was in the womb, before my nana was in the soil. I sometimes think the birds shout to be heard. To call their song before it becomes their last. To call forth into the air, to spread wings above the soil, and sing to the men in the streets, of a time long gone, when people would walk barefoot into their graves.

The cul-de-sac I grew up in was called Manuera Place, “Of many birds.” I would see Pheasants, Tui, Ruru, Weka, Riroriro, Blackbirds, Sparrows, Kelp gulls, Red gulls, Black gulls, Shags, Dotterols, Godwits, Spoonbills, Tomtits, Oystercatchers, Herons, Gannets, Terns, Harriers, Skylarks, Kotare, Bellbirds. We had Swallows that would nest in the garage rafters. The Banksia tree by the kitchen window would mean the Tui would rub their backs on the house. Every time the dog was walked through the dunes the seagulls would dive-bomb you into running.

I remember seeing birders collect annually on the beach for the return of Godwits. Margaret and Stuart Slade helped me learn about bittern in the Nukuhou salt marsh — with listening trips to Uretara Island at low tide. My mum likes birds, all the art in our house is birds. We have a shelf of clay owls; Mum gave me my favourite one when I moved out of home. I have been watching birds on the periphery all my life. They have become an archetype of my writing; I hear seagulls every time they squawk. I am trying to move this watching to the forefront. It makes me happy to look at the birds.

“Qualitative research indicates a relationship between the presence of natural sounds and a state of positive affect... participants associated listening to birdsong with a positive affective state... ‘When you have not been sleeping and you wake up very early and you hear the dawn chorus and you hear the birds, you can suddenly in seconds feel uplifted…’” (Ratcliffe).

The roof still howls at me like it did at 15, the tui still taunt me at my window.

Concoctions of magpie call, over angry paradise ducks. Starling set the roof. The flies make known this pile of manure I'm in.

But there's 12 white butterflies in the garden, and a blackbird warming in the sun, perched in a nook of a macrocarpa. I can see bees.

I'm going to watch the birds for a while. I’ll be riding my bike and listening to the birds. I’m interested in the performance of such, the actual sitting and observing. I’m also interested in the modes in which birding, listing and cross-species examination comes to define the observer and the observed. Rather, what is the affect of quantitative study of birds on the experiential element, but also on the conservation of birds?

“According to Durkheim, this religious animal-human kinship assigns humans their place in the universe... founder of core shamanism Michael Harner recommends calling upon a guardian animal through dance and trance to become one with the spirit... ‘underneath our ordinary human cultural consciousness is a near-universal emotional connection with wild animal alter egos.’” (Robertson 14).

A large bird circles above
It could be a condor, I think maybe it's a vulture.

I wonder what kind of bird that is, circling above, next to the sound of a prop plane. I hope it picks out my innards.

Goodnight my sweet dear, this bird is still circling, the wind seems to be picking up, and I'm looking for something beyond this beautiful horizon.

Somewhere within the words to come I hope to finding a flapping of wings. Within slippery words, postcard videos and anecdotes I might find something of me. I will detach soon, you’ll hear about it then. But for now I'm looking at the birds, I’m migrating myself, I’m going to listen to my skin. I’m going to stretch my liminality into some wings.

Because maybe I am a Bird.


Ratcliffe, Eleanor. “Sound and Soundscape in Restorative Natural Environments: A Narrative Literature Review.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, Apr. 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563

Robertson, Venetia Laura Delano. “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement.” Nova Religio, vol. 16, no. 3, Feb. 2013, pp. 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.7