Tracey is a spoonwhisperer. She started this curious practice in childhood, with an uncanny ability to find missing spoons. According to Tracey, when she whispers to the spoons, they often reply. By this means she is able to locate then when they’ve simply fallen into or behind something. It also enables her to find spoon caches in abandoned spoonwalker nests.

Spoonwalkers, as everyone knows, are keen on spoons and like to use them as stilts. They prefer to pick up matching sets, but getting four spoons of equal length and weight is no easy matter. It also doesn’t help that spoonwalkers aren’t terribly good at counting and show now signs of being able to manage a multiplication table. As a consequence, when a spoonwalker lays eggs, it cannot simply multiply the number of eggs by four and thus deduce the number of spoons the offspring will need when they are ready to leave the nest. For this reason, expectant spoonwalkers simply grab all of the spoons they can get, and make a nest with those. It does also give the young spoonwalkers a better hope of finding spoons that make decent sets as they wobble their way out into the wider world. It may well be that spoonwalkers like to keep caches of spoons for future use, or because a spoon hoard has some kind of significance to them.

When a nest is abandoned, rejected spoons may be left behind. Other spoonwalkers may of course find them, unless Tracey gets there first. By this means, Tracey is able to sell spoons back to the spoon-deprived population of the island.

There have been speculations that Tracey is really a spoonwalker whisperer with the uncanny power to get spoonwalkers to steal spoons and bring them back to her for resale. That all seems a bit far-fetched though, especially the idea that anyone could persuade a spoonwalker to relinquish a spoon it had found. On having their spoons removed, spoonwalkers generally set off with a terrible keening noise and will flop around behind you until you give them the spoon back. It really isn’t worth the effort. As Tracey isn’t perpetually hounded by disgruntled spoonwalkers, it seems reasonable to conclude that it really is the spoons she whispers to, although what she says to them, she isn’t prepared to reveal.