Garden Watch

In the Garden I watch the crows on the empty branches of the Bunya Pine in the distance, crowing out to us all, a bit like neighbourhood security guards dressed in black, until the Noisy miners come along. What pests they are, the teenage hoodlums, the gangs who chase the crows up the Bunya in what I can only describe as Bird Snakes and Ladders.

Closer to home I look up and notice the curled up bundle of a brush tailed possum on a branch of the mandarin tree. His drooping tail gave him away. He is exhausted from spending part of the night on the deck with C, devouring the stone of a peach I had left out for him. His little claws stripping the stone clean of all available flesh, leaving perceptible furrows of where he has worked at it like those drawn by a piston bully on a slope. Here he is tackling a pear core.

The rainbow lorikeets are in the lilly pilly and enjoying the fruit that is just emerging. However they sneakily get in on the sunflower seeds as our geriatric cockatoos are becoming a regular.  We think there are two of them, one a lot worse then the other. Gone is its sulphur crest, its feathers very sparse on its head and front. They do live to a very ripe old age and I guess this is one of them. We note that they seem to be stronger in recent days and the other birds are being kind to them and letting them feed. 

The kookaburras come in at 500pm. I could set my clock by them. One flies in and then the other. One is porky, if ever a bird can be described as such, and has pretty blue feathers, the other leaner, perhaps a young one. They love their mince mixed with insects and yolk, which I specially prepare for them following the advice of my bird guru Paul Perrett. The cockatoos will come in at varying times in the day and play with the silver ties to the tablecloth. They delight in taking them off one by one and then scrunching up my tablecloth. Usually I muscle in on them just before they complete their little act of rebellion. 

At various times of the day the sounds of my neighbour's children playing imaginative games, Dougall barking and the sounds of butcher birds on the wire, now a little wary of approaching as the Kookaburras are higher in the pecking order.

Such is the richness of life and sounds we need in our lives at the moment.