Their birds are not like our birds

Kookaburra on campus

When I walk to school, I get mercilessly laughed at.  It's really quite a sad state of affairs.  It could be because people find it weird when I sit down in the middle of the path to watch lorikeets.  Or it could just be the kookaburras.  Because they seriously do laugh.  I saw my first kookaburra on campus the other day, and then we got to see some more at Symbio.  They can be quite large, and have incredibly strong beaks that they use to grab inanimate food and smash it on the ground until it's dead for a second time, kind of the way that cats try to kill cooked steaks. 

Cockatoo with character

I love Australia's parrot-like birds (my own biological classification), including parrots, lorikeets, and cockatoos, and hopefully others that I just haven't seen yet.  They have character.  It's easy to tell that they're smart, curious, and mischievous.  The sulphur-crested cockatoos in the botanical gardens liked to chew on things, I'm convinced, for their own personal amusement.  I also have a hunch that the ones at Symbio learned to say hello to visitors in order to convince people to make fools of themselves by trying to talk to birds (if that was their aim, they certainly succeeded.  I believe a fantastic video of Richard trying to coax them to talk exists somewhere).  We see cockatoos (and hear them!) constantly around Wollongong.  They won't come nearly as close to people, but their mannerisms have so much personality that they're still a lot of fun to watch. 

One of my biggest distractions on campus are the lorikeets.  These small birds are incredibly colorful, incredibly loud, and incredibly common.  They love the trees just outside of the building where I work.  They also, perhaps unfortunately, frequent the tree right outside the library window where I like to sit and work.  Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when there are lorikeets outside the window??  I have indeed sat down directly in the middle of the path in the Wollongong Botanical Gardens to watch them in the tree above me, and I'm sure I'll do it again.  Too bad I didn't have a camera that day - the picture to the right is from Symbio (some of the lorikeets that climbed on my arm).

Then there are the rosellas.  I've seen two species - the crimson rosella and the eastern rosella.  I first saw the crimson rosella as a bright flash of blue wings and red bodies as two of them swept past me on campus.  I got strange looks for trying to follow them and get a better view.  The picture is again from Symbio.  I saw a pair of eastern rosellas while I was walking home from uni.  They are beautiful, but left before I could take a picture, so you might want to look them up on Google images or Wikipedia. 

Campus ponds are also full of birds of unusual characters.  We have an abundance of very fat ducks that hiss and sway their heads back and forth when you get close, and then follow you so you can pet them some more.  I enjoy petting the ducks.  We also have swamp hens everywhere.  They are shallow-water waders, and when they walk around the Uni Bar they seem rather like turkeys.

White ibis

Galahs on campus

City birds can't even be regular around here.  Many of the parrot-type birds do frequent the cities.  But when we were in Sydney, one of the most common birds we saw was the white ibis, wandering around many areas eating plants.  And the pigeons refuse to be normal pigeons - they have to go one-up and grow a pointy bit of feathers on top of their heads.  Hence they are called crested pigeons.  I spent a while confused about some pigeons I saw that had bright pink bellies.  Then one put up its white crest and I figured out that they are a type of cockatoo called a galah (emphasis on second syllable).  They mate for life and are usually seen with their partners. 

Today we were playing soccer near campus and had a bunch of seagulls on the field while a flock of cattle egrets flew low over us.  There are cattle egrets everywhere, often appearing (bizarrely enough) in amongst cattle.  I've also seen a few more exotic birds.  The other day I spotted a black swan, which was really exciting.  I haven't seen too many raptors, but I did get to see an Australian kestrel, and yesterday we got a distant but clear view of a white-bellied sea eagle.

Those are the birds I think of right now... plus pelicans, several types of cormorants, masked lapwings (which look rather like stilts but like to wander around cities), and other common small birds such as mynas, magpies, and crows (their crows don't sound ANYTHING like ours.  They sound like crying babies most of the time).  Also the aptly-named willie wagtails, who like to hop around all day and wag their tails. 

I figured there are enough bird watchers reading this blog that the subject matter would be of interest!