My place of gainful employment is graced with a whole stack of regular wild bird visitors. Seeing animals makes me very happy, and birds have such amusing personalities. I love to stop every now and then, just watching them cavort in the trees or across the lawns.
The locals are the crows, though there are pigeons and doves, seagulls (they come over from the Swan River), mudlarks, willie wagtails, some varieties of sparrow or finch, rainbow lorikeets, twenty-eight parrots (named for their call, supposedly sounding like “twenty-eight”), and gorgeous white cockatoos and red-tailed cockatoos. I’ve also been super blessed to see the resident boobook owl on two occasions!
No, I’m not a bird watcher or ornithologist. It’s animals in general that fascinate me endlessly.
The cockatoos are the most hilarious. They all love to vie for the top-most branches on the trees. These are, of course, also the thinnest and weakest of the branches, so you’ll see the birds swaying back and forth, wings outstretched to maintain their balance, because they will not let got of that prime position in the tree. Cockatoos also love to tear up grass, and you’ll often see them dotting the lawns.
All the parrot-like birds will sometimes hang upside down from a branch. In the cockatoo’s cases, it’s because they really want that branch! When it’s the lorikeets or twenty-eights, it’s usually because something they’re eating is hanging at such an angle, they can only reach it by also hanging downwards. I think two of the lorikeets were checking out one of the hollowed tree branches as a potential nest yesterday!
Today, I kid you not, I saw two crows holding hands. Erm, holding claws. Feet. You know. They were standing side by side, just hanging out, one with its foot curled around the top of its friend. They were very serene. I called out to the crows that I was onto them.
I know what those birds are up to. They’re being birds.
~A
The Fane 
Going to tweet this post to my bird-loving friends on Twitter!
That is all kinds of hilarious, Cynthia! Thank you. XD
~A
What a wonderful post!! I love the part about the crows — what amazing animals, so intelligent! Found you through Cynthia’s tweet — the birds would love that, wouldn’t they? Send me tweet regards to your bird friends!
Thank you, Julia! Yes, the crows are so intelligent! Sometimes I see one which has found a food or drink container (they do love to raid the rubbish/garbage if they can!), and they will peer at it intently, trying to figure out how to get inside. I remember also seeing a crow picking up a whole orange one time, flying into a tree, and dropping it onto the cement below until the orange split open so it could eat the fruit easily!
Thanks for visiting!
~A
Ugh, my dad owned a cockatoo once. Her name was Sassy, and lets just say it was appropriate – she hated me (and all other women), and was the loudest, screechiest bird you’d ever meet.
The crows though – that’s adorable. It’s cool you’re able to spot so many birds – it seems like I can never really see a large group of them around where I live. I’ll spot a few, but nothing like what you’ve described.
I often think that birds have much nicer personalities when they remain wild, but I’ve also met some lovely pet birds (who were usually hand-raised from a chick to be friendly with people). Cockatoos seem to go a bit “weird” in captivity; I think it has something to do with them being such a social flock bird, when they don’t have a flock to chill with, they get all kinds of birdy emotional issues. 😦
I’m very lucky that my workplace has so many trees and gardens surrounding it, so it attracts all the birds!
~A