You better not complain about your birds! You've got some of the coolest birds on the planet flying about in your backyard airspace... The most exotic bird I get to see is the occasional Indigo Bunting. I have never even seen a Painted Bunting, and that would be closest I would ever come to a "parrot"-type bird around here. I'd probably drop my camera! But I do love the natives we have, even if their sartorial splendor doesn't stack up too high... :0)
I wasn't complaining about our native birds, just about the European birds who are displacing them. Visiting our birch tree out the front we get
Green Parrots, a kind of Rosella; Butcherbirds; a
Brown Falcon who likes to disembowel his prey there; and others such as Kookaburras, though they are an introduced species from the Australian mainland. The Falcon also likes to sit on the posts of the chicken run, not to attack the chickens, but the sparrows that eat the chook food. We also see Nankeen Kestrals around here and Peregrine Falcons a little further afield.
Yellow Wattle Birds visit our flowering cherry in spring and the apple tree in autumn, as do various honeyeaters.
We often see high above us the now rare
wedge tailed eagle. And sometimes we run over on our roads the totally brainless
native hens , who like to put their heads down like the Roadrunner and run flat out into the path of your vehicle. I once followed one at about 15 miles an hour down the road for about 50 yards before it turned off to the right onto another road, still running flat out down the centre of the road, silly thing!
...just to name a few. We are within 12 miles of the sea, so we get to see lots of marine and estuary birds as well, from Pacific gulls and Pelicans to Sooty Oyster Catchers and White Faced Herons.
("...gay your life must be...")
How'd you know that one? I learned that in kindergarten:
"Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree-ee,
merry merry king of the bush is he-ee,
Laugh, Kookaburra laugh, Kookaburra
gay your life must be."
There were variants of course, such as
"Kookaburra sits on the telephone wire,
Jumping up and down with his pants on fire..."
Tasmania has 12 species of bird that are endemic and occur nowhere else in the world.
