Living with beautiful trees all round the house gives a lovely chance to observe the many different varieties of birds that inhabit the branches.
What we find most interesting is when a particular bird decides to stay around in our trees for a length of time.
One example of this was the Laughing Kookaburra pictured.
If he wasn’t calling out loudly from the nearby trees, he was laughing and chortling on the rail of our verandah. It didn’t seem to matter if we were sitting on the verandah having morning tea. It would still land there and seemed to be talking to us by chortling away. We always kept still and made no effort to move closer to him.
Eventually he would go back into the tree. He stayed for about three weeks and we certainly missed him when he was gone.
A number of little birds would forage around us, the Varied Triller being one that seemed most unafraid of them all. It would often forage in Glenda’s hanging baskets looking for juicy morsels.
The Spangled Drongos would come in groups mainly in the morning making a lot of noise to announce their presence. A pair of these did nest in a tree next door but the others did not stay around.
The smaller birds seemed to move out when some Pied Currawongs came for a few days.
Having lived in school residences at small schools in the bush and hearing the continuous, monotonous ‘ark, ark, ark’ of many crows all day, every day, it came as quite a shock one day to hear that droning call coming from one of our local trees. They were well out of their area and didn’t stay long.
