Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Garden Guests Diary - Birds in our Garden 2007

Sunday, March 18th, 2007

The grey butcher birds have had their second lot of youngsters - two or three, and we have been able to feed the young ones by hand. Our favourite little grey juvenile is the tiniest addition to their brood and we have called him “Ollie”. Ollie has oodles of personality and sits on the side fence, chirping quietly, waiting to be fed. He is the smallest and tamest little bird I have seen and right from the start he showed no fear. (We can’t feed the parents by hand) He is much more independent than his feathered siblings but is still learning about co-ordination and sometimes grabs our fingers instead of the mince when we are feeding him. He is the cutest little bird and I just want to pick him up and cuddle him! I look forward to seeing him every day ….

Ollie, our favourite grey butcher bird

We had an interesting visit from a family of sulphur crested cockatoos recently and while two of them were happily munching our seed bell, the third one was on the roof of our pergola and at one stage we could only see his head peering down at us below. It was so comical that I quickly ran for my camera. Peter, my husband attempted to feed him by hand and the inquisitive cockatoo was very close to grabbing the seed out of Peter’s hand but my husband was concerned that the cockatoo might bite his finger instead!

Inquisititive and adventurous sulphur-crested cockatoo

I also managed to get a few more photos of Neville, our crazy noisy miner and it’s the first time that we have actually regularly fed one of these birds in our garden but Neville is very unique. He still appears when the other birds are feeding and has now mastered the art of catching the mince in his beak when we throw it at him!

Neville

The ‘boldest’ of the junior pied butcher birds is driving us crazy! He comes down about five times a day squawking for food and he does not give up because we have tried to ignore him! When the squawking fails to get us out into the yard, he adopts to ‘choir practice’ and sings beautifully. When I am working in my study, he sits up on a tree branch and I am serenaded by him and beautiful as it is, it is quite distracting. I would much rather him sing though than squawk and he is growing up so fast and learning from his parents.

Our annoying but loveable “singing” juvenille pied butcherbird

tagged under: .Australian Birds.Birds.feeding birds.garden birds.garden guests.grey butcherbird.noisy miner.pied butcherbird.sulphur-crested cockatoo