07/01/2026
So I wake up today and Melbourne’s doing that thing where the weather is like:
“Congrats, comrade. You now live inside a hair dryer.”
I’m like, sweet, I’ll capture another epic beach day and the extreme heat. Bit of cinematic suffering. Aerial footage of suburbia melting into soup.
As soon as I take off, Carlos the raven rocks up like the bloody Air Traffic Control / Border Force / KGB all rolled into one angry feathered bureaucrat.
Every time I tried to take off — SWOOP.
Not a “friendly warning swoop” either… like a full “I’ve seen your browsing history and I’m disappointed” swoop.
I’m 99% sure it’s the same raven that bros down with me for airspace since 2020. Except now he’s upgraded.
He brought his cousins:
Roberto (the loud one who does the yelling and sits above Aspendale station)
Boris (built like a footy and full of violence)
Vlad (doesn’t swoop… just stares… like he’s calculating your mortgage repayments)
I swear to god it wasn’t nature anymore — it was organised crime. It felt less like nature and more like I’d accidentally flown into a post-Soviet protection racket.
Carlos is circling like:
“Nice drone, Eugene… would be shame if something happen, yeah?”
And mate, in this heat my brain is already cooked. I’m sweating out electrolytes, childhood memories, and half my superannuation… and now I’m negotiating airspace with four feathered psychos.
They start running coordinated tactics too. Proper military s**t:
one dives
one watches the drone like it’s a pizza delivery
Vlad just stands there like Putin at a press conference: calm, unblinking, full of lies
Meanwhile I’m crouched behind a tree like a WWII correspondent going:
“Tell my wife… the drone died doing what it loved… disappointing me.”
Because you know what the real fear is?
Not the birds.
It’s going home and explaining to my wife why I’ve turned a $6,000 drone into an expensive hovering bird snack that now identifies as a submarine.
At one point I swear Carlos made eye contact and I felt my ancestors flinch.
Like, I’m from Ukraine — I’ve got bureaucracy trauma in my DNA — and this bird looked at me like Centrelink looks at a single mum.
So I packed up. I retreated. I surrendered the skies.
Because today Melbourne wasn’t “extreme heat”.
Today was Raven Coup Day.
And Carlos?
Carlos is now the legal owner of the air above my suburb.
For one day.
