When I found out about Jill Sampson's Bimblebox Art Project, raising awareness of and support for the campaign to protect the Bimblebox nature area from the proposed Adani Carmichael mine in north Queensland, I wanted to be involved. The fact that Jill chose birds and printmaking as the focus of the project made it even more compelling to me. My mother, Gail Muriel Burgess, was a printmaker and had an obsession with birds. She collected feathers compulsively, using the long flight feathers to sweep bubbles from her plates in their acid baths, and she believed the disturbance caused by the wings of birds in flight affected everything.

I chose the spotted nightjar, a bird species related to the tawny frogmouth, to write about because of the natty name. The nightjar is a hard-to-see bird who roosts on the ground and shares the ground's colours. As chicks, though, nightjars are a solid, warm red, incandescent against the greys and browns of the earth and their parents. The effort a parent nightjar must go to in shielding their bright young seemed like a fitting model for the effort we must make to keep the animals and plants who are our neighbours and kin safe.