Some Bird events.

This post was inspired by Hungry's post in the carving forum in which he shows a noisy miner that has crashed through a window.

I remember as a kid that every morning a pee-wee would attack its reflection in the next door neighbour's bathroom widow. As
a little tacker this always intrigued me. This sort of sight is familiar to all of us I guess and I gues we have all seen the results of
birds having crashed into a window.

When I was building the house on the farm I had such an incident. I had installed the first of three large sliding doors and not long after heard a thud.
On checking I found a dead bird that I did not recognize, except for the fact that it was a finch of some kind. Checking revealed it to be a European
gold finch, a very attractive bird it was too.

The following summer I was picking oranges and found a black shouldered kite impaled on a dead branch of one tree. It must have dived on its prey
and miscued or failed to see the branch.

Another time my first wife was driving out of the Yanco Agricultural Research Station through which runs the Main irrigation canal. As she crossed the
bridge over the canal a duck fell from the sky. The unfortunate duck had been fling along the canal and hit the power lines, where they crossed the
canal at the bridge, and thereby broken its neck. We had duck for dinner the next night.

One time out in south western NSW a mate and I watched in astonishment as wedge tailed eagle landed on a kangaroo carrying a joey. The 'roo immediately
turned for the grey box trees where it succeeded in knocking the eagle from its back.

I once watched a pompous pelican as it eyed a flock of cormorants drive a shoal of fish toward the shallow waters along the shore of a lake. At the
appropriate time the pelican waddled to the water and started cruising among the cormorants. I soon discovered why it had done this. A cormorant near it
dived and came up with a fish . Our pelican friend grabbed the cormorant by the throat, shook it and retrieved the fish. This happened to several other
unsuspecting cormorants before our imperious friend was satiated.

Pelicans enjoy soaring on thermal currents and I have seen them soar to enormous heights and some among them will then point their beaks to the ground
and dive. As the bird gathers speed it and the air rushes over its feathers a whistling sound sets up. On reaching a certain point the pelican opens its wings
and a loud "wump" is heard. How the wings are not ripped off our feathered friends I will never know.

How many others amongst our number have had interesting bird encounters.?

We occasionally get a pair of hawks (forget what type, must look them up again) around. Once, I saw a puff of feathers and a noisey miner just escaped with his life. Looking around the garden, I saw an Indian dove hiding in an overturned flower pot. Another time, I heard a thump against the upstairs glass doors, and saw a dead Indian dove on the verandah, with a hawk sitting on the verandah post and his mate on the telegraph pole across the road. Shortly after, the dove was gone.

Our local magpie family walk into the workshop past the dog and rummage in the shavings until I weaken and get them some meat.

we have a family of kookaburras that have a great time with whatever lives in the mulch
wasn't quite quick enough with the camera to get a piccy of one with a tail hanging out its mouth, swallowed as I went click bugga

we've also a few currawongs - which, much to my delight, drove off the mynahs a few years back

Cormorants can do a fairly good impersonation of a shark fin emerging at a distance :oThey've certainly got my heart to skip a beat a number of times while waiting for a wave in the silver gray water of Western port.

On our way to school in NZ my sister and I heard a squealing noise and saw a hawk flying with a live rabbit in its talons. When it had gained a height of a hundred feet or so it dropped the rabbit and went into a dive behind it. The rabbit hit the deck, the hawk grabbed it as it bounced and flew off with the now floppy rabbit.
Another day we heard a crash as a wood pigeon being chased by a sparrow hawk flew through the asbestos sheet cladding of the car garage. Hard on its heels the hawk managed to climb and clear the roof. The pigeon was dead on the floor at the other end of the garage.
This was in the late 1950's and was probably when we first became aware that asbestos was bad for your health.

AlexS have you tried giving your Maggies raw peanuts? They love them.

Cheers,
Geoff.

Growing up on a dairy farm, there was a plethora of birds around looking for seed from the seasonal stock crops.

When it was nesting time for willy wag tails, they would pick the loose hair off the cows backs to line their nests and the cows would stop whatever they were doing and keep still until they took off with their beaks full of fur.

One that really stands out was a pair of kookaburras that whenever they saw the tractor with the plow hitched up would sit in a tree and wait for the worms to be turned out in the furrows then only one of them would swoop and get the worms and take it back to its mate. Always the same one and its mate never did it until one day i was close enough to get a really good look at its mate, it had a deformed beak that didn't allow it to get worms and the other one looked after it and feed it like a young chick. This went on for about 7 years until Dad gave up farming.

Geoff, I haven't tried giving them peanuts, not sure of they'd be good for them. The magpies are great birds, very intelligent and, around here at least, very friendly. Sometimes, usually when they have chicks, they'll come and ask for food, but usually there's enough for them in the garden and we don't want to make them dependent. There's one who will follow me into the house when I go upstairs to get some meat.

We have a few king parrots around, and they are also quite tame. One day I was getting some timber out of the rack and one came and sat on the fence. He didn't move when I walked past with the timber, so I went inside to get some seed for him. When I came back he was sitting on the drying rack outside the door, and hopped onto my wrist to eat from my hand.

When I was visiting my parents on Bribie Island we had a meal at a fish and chip shop just north of the bridge. They have a back verandah where you can eat your meal that hangs out over the water but at low tide there is some sand at the bottom.

Pelicans would wait on the sand for people to throw them food scraps. There were of course seagulls perching on the high points around the verandah also waiting for food. If you threw the food in the air the seagulls would catch it on the fly. If you threw it down to the pelicans they would catch it in their mouths as they stood there.

With plenty of chips to spare I started to experiment. I started throwing chips for the seagulls lower and lower to find out how low they had to go before they were abandoned to the pelicans. At he same time I tried throwing the chips for the pelicans higher and higher to see when the seagulls would get them before the pelicans.

I found out that there was a "grey area" where the chips were hotly contested, with occurrences of seagulls flying through pelicans beaks to steal the chips just in the nick of time. While there ware no actual casualties among the birds this provided entertainment for my kids and many others dining there that day.

Cheers

Doug

Quote:

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Originally Posted by artme

One time out in south western NSW a mate and I watched in astonishment as wedge tailed eagle landed on a kangaroo carrying a joey. The 'roo immediately
turned for the grey box trees where it succeeded in knocking the eagle from its back.



How the wings are not ripped off our feathered friends I will never know.

How many others amongst our number have had interesting bird encounters.?

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that's a large prey for the wedgie ... rabbits are more their go although they will take a fox too

i always wondered how the gannets survive their dives but read recently that they don't always manage that and occasionally break their neck in the dive ... peregrine falcons too ... hit speeds of over 200 mph in their dives .. the fastest recorded at about 240mph (389kmh in fact) ... the impact certainly kills the prey but i wonder that they don't do heaps of damage to themselves

i have quite a few interesting encounters but will share just three (i have posted some photos on flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/132842758@N06/? to show these ...
1. in my own backyard heard an odd rasping sound with which i wasn't familiar ... turned out to be a welcome swallow being strangled by a grey butcherbird .... managed to get a camera and a couple of shots of him with the swallow before he ate it ... later he came to sit on the back verandah railing and i got quite close ... i reckon he was too heavy to take off at that stage

2. at the glebe near bega nsw ... 6 photos in this series (not in time order) ... two swamp harriers were targeting some baby ducklings ... as they dived, the parents would make an odd quack and the babies would immediately dive .. the parents launched themselves up at the harriers and put them off their dive ... eventually those two gave up (after twenty minutes) but two other harriers had obviously already won some prey ... another time i saw (at mogareeka) a harrier chasing a hoary head grebe .. the harrier about two feet above the water, the grebe six inches under ... i thought the harrier would get him but as the grebe surfaced and the harrier dived, a juvenile harrier interfered with the dive and the grebe got into some reeds

3. the next photo is at bastion point near mallacoota before they started work on the breakwater ... a sooty and a pied oystercatcher in the same frame ... sooties normally favour rocks and pied sand and this was near a conjunction of both ... the frist and only time i have seen the two together though

regards david

Quote:

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Originally Posted by robbygard

i have quite a few interesting encounters but will share just three (i have posted some photos on flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/132842758@N06/? to show these ...

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Some great photos there. You forgot to mention the wooden car, tractor and wheel making amongst the bird pics.
I wonder if a certain Mr Crowie will stumble upon these photos:).

Alan...

I have an Indian mynah trap, and twice I've caught a grey butcher bird. I suspect he's worked out that he can get a free feed and then be released.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by artme

One time out in south western NSW a mate and I watched in astonishment as wedge tailed eagle landed on a kangaroo carrying a joey. The 'roo immediately
turned for the grey box trees where it succeeded in knocking the eagle from its back.

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talking of birds taking things bigger than usual, i have just posted two more photos

https://www.flickr.com/photos/132842758@N06/?

in one a brown goshawk has taken a magpie lark (peewee) which is somewhat bigger than they would usually manage to bring down

the second a brown falcon is considering taking me for a meal

regards david

Great photography David. A few years ago the cement silo's at Karratha hosted a pair of peewees nesting on a steel stay under the top deck and a pair of falcons nested just two or three feet above them inside a boxed section of the structure. There never appeared to be any animosity or alarm between the two families. A bloke who used to ride his push bike past the yard got dive bombed by the peewees quite frequently, yet they left us alone working in the yard. One day he jumped off his treadly and started throwing stones at them, we told him to desist and decamp (or words to that effect).
I'm not sure if the raw peanuts are bad for maggies, they love them, I don't give them very many but if I thought they weren't doing them any good I'd stop. I read that bread is not good for them.
Cheers,
Geoff.

We live on acres in a rural district. Opposite us is a high voltage staunchen. At the top cross bar is a large stick nest made by some Wedgetail Eagles. They have lived there for years but haven't seen them in recent years. About 300 metres up the road from the staunchen is a house. One hot and very still summer's day, the neighbour heard a great bang on his corrugated iron roof. He went to investigate and found half a dead wallaby on the roof. He reckoned it was an airlifted cargo that fell while on its way to the eagles nest
We get great entertainment with the wild birds that drop by. We have purposely got water troughs around to drawer in the birds.

Yes, a permanent water supply is essential for attracting birds to the garden. We've got two watering points that have been in operation without fail since we arrived here in 2006. There's a timer that comes on for 1 minute three times a day. The flow is gravity from a tank so no pump required. When we go on holiday I put new batteries in the timer.
Cheers,
Geoff.

My son flies scale gliders at Otford using the onshore wind shear and it is quite common for sea eagles to try and attack aircraft and they can be very persistent when they want to be. We also have a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo problem on nights that the garbage is collected. I haven't actually seen them do it but somehow they gang up on a bin and lift the lid enough that it swings open then they attack the contents. Some time ago we couldn't figure out why the fish population was dropping in our ponds until Mrs P saw a Kookaburra treating the pond like his own fishing hole and pinching fish. We put a cover over them and now the Kookas line up on the fence trying to figure out how to get fish out of the covered pond.

Living and going to school in Canberra in the early 70's there was a pesky magpie which used to swoop us on the way to the bus.
This day I was wandering up to the bus stop and heard that distinctive magpie snap of wings noise, I've ducked and at the same time lifted my bag above my head. It was one of those Globite suitcase affairs. The magpie hit the case and then the deck, stunned. I looked at it and thought "I've killed it!" "It's probably just stunned" I couldn't do anything about it then so I wandered off and caught the bus.
When I got home the bird had gone but I did notice over the next few days that I never got swooped again, which had other benefits...

Working in Bougainville we did a lot of helicopter work. Once, we were approaching a radio repeater to replace the batteries when the pilot saw a wedgetail coming in from the side. He banked away and caught the wedgie in the downwash from the rotor. The poor old wedgetail didn't know what had happened to him - feathers went every which way!

We have several different species of hummingbirds here in the summers.
1 sugar+3 water in the feeders attracts them between bug hunting blitzes
(just think of small bats on the day-shift.)

Rufous hummingbirds are bright copper with red iridescent feathered throats.
Extremely aggressive and beligerent and territorial. Not at all unusual to have 3 or 4
displaying thier flared/barred tail feathers like a fan, screaming and pushing eachother around the feeder,
all done at what must be 60-80kph or faster.
The others are the smallest = Calliope, really big = Black chinned and medium Anna's.

At night, they roost and turn down their metabolism so low you can pick them off tree branches with your fingers.
Gone now. First to arrive 3rd Saturday in April, males leave early July. Females and young of the year
just gone this week.