Western Walkabout: Bird Watching
Richard Harris tells why he is bird-wary.
There’s a bird I have to watch rather carefully near where I live. It sits on the power line above the entrance to the pedestrian way linking my street to the next one.
The bird is a mudlark, known colloquially as a peewee.
During the nesting season, it swoops down on passers-by and pecks them on the head. A couple of years ago, I was running through late in the afternoon when the bird swooped on me. I wasn’t wearing my running hat because it was later in the day.
I couldn’t believe the injury. The bird broke the skin on my scalp and drew blood before returning to its roost.
I stopped 50 metres away to watch it. A boy was delivering junk mail to the local letterboxes. The peewee swooped on him, pecking his head.
People say magpies can be bad at this sort of behaviour but that little peewee definitely outbadded them. It was worse than that huge brown falcon that used to swoop on cross-country runners at the top end of Kings Park.
We had to change the running course through that stupid chook – only during the nesting season, of course.
