Horse 373 - Bird Watching

No not like that. I know what you thought I meant and I only wish... but believe me, in Mosman it just isn't worth the effort.

Anyway.

This afternoon I sat in the park eating lunch and reading the paper when a big black magpie came down and hung around for about 5 minutes. Not content with the chips I had thrown out for it, it decided to go and get its mates. By that stage I'd finished with my chicken and chips so upon finding that there wasn't anything left, one of the little bastards decided that my the back of my head looked pretty delicious so it decided to have a chomp at that.

Not surprising I moved. A flock of Rainbow Lorikeets were having a domestic high up in the trees and I thought having just been through the reminder from the magpies (and with my head still bleeding) that I'd better keep my distance.

If you've not seen a Rainbow Lorikeet then you really are missing out. They hang around in massive groups rather like pigeons but unlike pigeons, they have a most impressive colour scheme. In fact it's so brilliant, it makes the Benetton catalogue look like EGA from the 80s.

Some galahs showed up for a bit. Now I've always thought that galahs apart from their odd coats of pink and grey rather look like businessmen standing around with their hands behind their back. Galahs have to be about the laziest of all the birds that you'll see in suburbia, even more so than seagulls who feast on rubbish squawking as they go, galahs merely walk about the place, picking at stuff as they go.

Speaking of seagulls, has anyone else noticed how extraordinarily interested they are in cricket? Invariably at least once a year you'll see a seagull get hit on the telly by a cricket ball on its merry way to the boundary.

The birds that really interest me are lyrebirds. So called because of the shape of their big tail plumes, they have an amazing ability to imitate anything that they hear. If you went to Taronga Zoo you may be inclined to call them the Pentax 35 bird, as that's the noise that they hear the most and the noise which by inference that they repeat.

Birds are great, especially considering you can eat some of them sometimes.