Golden orioles and eucalyptus, eucalyptus and golden orioles: an ecotopia

Abstract

In an abandoned copse on the outskirts of a village in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, golden orioles and eucalyptus encounter and reencounter each spring. Year after year, season after season, they shape a community, ephemeral but cyclical. As beings that diverge in many ways but are similar in others, they share that time and place, but also certain ambiguities and exoticisms, the fact of being perceived as foreign and somewhat odd, as if they would never going to fit in completely. In this manner, eucalyptus and golden orioles, birds and trees, exercise their respective agencies and configure the networks and interrelations of an imperfect ecotopia that does not aspire to an ideal, but to do what it possible with what is available.