Imagine if you can a Canberra, at this time of writing the most avifaunally-blessed city on Earth, so whirled and burned and withered by a changed climate (for this is a Bush Capital of combustible bush) that it has no birds left. Not one.

Back to this nightmare in a moment.

First, though, to my observation that the prime minster and I, already with so much in common (save for small things like our differing personalities, beliefs, sizes of intellect, preparedness to tell the truth, etc) are also, whenever he is at The Lodge, quite near neighbours.

As the raven flies we are suburbanly cheek by jowl here in the federal capital city's leafy, aspirational inner south.

This must mean that, blessed as we both are with nice big gardens, we attract similar numbers of birds and bird species to each of our gardens here in this most bird-blessed of cities. Perhaps the prime minister shares my delight in catering for and then watching the birds, putting out food for them and making sure they have sparklingly clean water in their bird baths. Perhaps we share the special joy there is in being a little sprayed and sprinkled by flying bird bath water as we watch a big bird (a magpie, say, a currawong, raven or cockatoo) taking its wild abandoned bath.

Quite why this sort of thing is such a joy (neuroscientists nominate the importance of the brain's "mirror neurons" in enabling us to take delight in seeing the delight enjoyed by other beings) but a joy it is.

But I have gone off at tangents. Back now to the nightmare of a Canberra (a city so bird-oriented it is almost a feathered city) without birds.

Methinks I am hoping that when and if the prime minister goes to Glasgow for the impending COP26 United Nations Climate Change conference he takes with him a planet-tenderised mind tenderised by his experiences of the birds in his Lodge garden.

Some of the most dire predictions of climate scientists have to do with climate-triggered extinctions of species, including birds. IPBES, the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, calculates that the changing climate now has one million plant and animal species teetering on the brink of extinction. Other science has it that Australia, already sunburntly hot and dry, is set to be one of the heated planet's first and most wretched casualties. Last August's report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spells out Australia's especially likely special plight.

Your columnist does his best to keep abreast of the scientific predictions of what is happening but even given my keen interest in these things I find myself bewildered and benumbed by the great blizzard of facts and opinions. Readers, surely you notice this same syndrome in yourselves.

Strangely (but not strangely at all, really, for it is a truism that fine fiction tells nuanced truths in ways mere reports, journalism and facts never can) I have in recent days found myself unbenumbed in these things by reading a long short story The Ghost Birds in my online New Yorker.

In this harrowingly upsetting piece of fiction author Karen Russell has imagined a time (by about the 2060s) when our climate-ruined planet has few live birds left to see. She reports that as things became hotter "many birds that headed for the cleaner, thinner air responded to extreme hypoxia just as their human counterparts did when [fleeing] from sea level to the Rockies and the Himalayas".

"Millions died from clotting blood. They fell from the skies in trickles, then torrents ... Obituary writers for Nature could not keep up.

"[But then] human beings, with our infernal ingenuity, adapted. We found ways to survive the death sentence we'd delivered to our gasping cohabitants of this planet."

The adaptation us bird-loving, now bird-bereft humans make in Russell's story is that we form ourselves into organisations like her imagined Paranormal Birding Society. Us humans take extraordinary, tragic pains to try and birdwatch the ghosts of the birds that the whirlings and burnings of the 2040s and 2050s have wiped out.

She expands her brilliant idea (ghost birds!) into a story that is somehow both surreal but also (with our planet suffering now in ways the Glasgow summit is soon to agonise over) alarmingly plausible. It is a story about climate change griefs that await us just around the corner; about how (as spelled out in Joni Mitchell's classic song Big Yellow Taxi) it's always the case that we don't know what we've lost till it's gone, till they've paved paradise and put all the trees in a tree museum.

The half-crazed, ever-twitching bird enthusiasms of those of us who love birds (they include this typically Canberran columnist and perhaps as well, as speculated above, my prime ministerial neighbour) are legendary. What will become of that loving enthusiasm (which of course when analysed is an enthusiasm for everything in nature) when its feathered objects (even its Gang-gang cockatoos) have fallen from the skies in torrents and are extinct? What forms will our grief take? Will we, half-mad, turn to occult ornithology?

Will the grief of Canberra and Canberrans be uniquely painful, given this was once a Bush Capital so distinguished and defined by its sheer birdiness? What is to become of us?