Bonzer Words!: Birds In The Yard
...Pale headed rosellas, turquoise and yellow, scaly breasted lorikeets, green and gold, and rainbow lorikeets, purple, green, gold and scarlet, all taking their turn to feast and joining the honey eaters, butcher birds and magpies...
Elaine Lutton delights in the avian visitors in the yard of her Queensland home.
Elaine writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
How I welcome the autumn weather in south-east Queensland. What a relief from the heat and humidity of summer. Now it is pleasantly sunny with clear blue skies but sufficiently cool to energise even my old bones. The wildlife in and around the yard seems to share my feelings and celebrate life with renewed enthusiasm.
The birds are beautiful and the birdbath and feeder we got for Christmas are coming into their own. The bath was an instant success with lots of birds using it for drinking and for taking a cooling plunge, but it took them a little longer to work out how to use the feeder. Eventually some avian Einstein solved the problem and now we have pale headed rosellas, turquoise and yellow, scaly breasted lorikeets, green and gold, and rainbow lorikeets, purple, green, gold and scarlet, all taking their turn to feast and joining the honey eaters, butcher birds and magpies in the bath. My husband and I both enjoy watching them as they bad-temperedly wait their turn.
Visiting the trees in the yard are mobs of white corellas which are smaller versions of cockatoos and just as noisy. Competing with the corellas are the beautiful pink and soft grey galahs. Feeding on the ground, looking for seeds, are the crested pigeons with their iridescent green and purple wings and their companions the peaceful doves. Our neighbours are disparaging about the ibis that visit us looking for a free handouts but I feel their long curved beaks give these mendicants a very 'snooty' demeanour. Nowhere near as elegant I admit, as the low flying pelicans, the catalinas of the bird world, that seem to dip their wings in the ocean as they fly home to the lagoon where they will roost for the night.
An Australian brush turkey has also adopted us. These are mound builders. The males build a big mound of dead leaves etc. and the females lay the eggs in the mound. The eggs are temperature-controlled by heaping on more leaves or removing them. We have called our turkey Scratch due to her habit of looking for berries and seed in the leaf litter underneath our trees. Joseph and Marcus, our grandsons aged 3 years and 18 months, love all our birds but especially the turkey, which Marcus tries to chase and envelop in a bear hug. He fails to understand why his affection is not reciprocated.
The sounds of the garden are equally delightful—the butcher bird's piping song, the kookaburra's morning reveille, the lorikeets' shrill calls when they wheel in huge numbers as a call goes up warning of a raptor overhead, or at sunset prior to roosting for the night. Come dusk the frogs come out and start rehearsing their croaking symphony. Inside the house the surprisingly loud squeak of the resident gecko amuses whilst even at in bed at night, revelling in being snugly under the doona, we smile at the loud thump on the roof just above our heads that is followed by the patter of feet.
'Possums' we sleepily murmur.
We turn over and know no more until the morning, secure and thankful in the knowledge that for us at least, it is a good world.
©Elaine Lutton
