How To Spot A Psychopath

I originally thought this blue-eyed cockatoo was, in another triumph of creative bird naming, called a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, but as commenters below point out, it’s actually a Little Corella.

It showed up all by itself at the feeding table, and grumpily snapped at the sulphur-crested cockatoos when they tried to get some of the seed. The newcomer is significantly smaller than a sulphur-crested, with a much less impressive crest, but it’s bigger - and apparently more bad-tempered - than a galah.

The newcomer was very successful at keeping the usually-boisterous mob of bigger birds away for a few minutes, while it filled up on the mound of sunflower seeds. (I am, as regular readers know, engaged in an ongoing experiment to determine whether wild cockatoos can become obese.) Then it flew away.

It took me a few tries to identify this bird [and then, as I’ve mentioned, I got it wrong…], because I couldn’t find anything resembling it in Birds in Backyards‘ excellent Bird Finder. The Finder usually leads you quite easily to the right Australian bird - it’s my first stop whenever I see a new feathered beastie here in Katoomba. But it didn’t work this time.

I thought that meant this wasn’t an Australian bird; if it actually had been a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, it would have been a slightly endangered native of the Bismarck Archipelago of New Guinea. That’s about 3100 kilometres (1926 miles, 558 leagues, 15,410 furlongs) from this house. As the crow, or cockatoo, flies.

So I figured this one was probably an escaped pet. But since it’s actually a Little Corella - the bags under the eyes are quite distinctive, if the crest isn’t up - the only odd thing is that I’ve never seen one at the feeder before. I don’t know why I didn’t find this bird’s page on Birds In Backyards. Perhaps someone forgot to tick the “blue” box in the “colours” part of that database entry, or perhaps I insisted it was finch-shaped, or something.

If you like watching large decorative birds eating seed, flapping around and squabbling with each other, this is the blog post for you.

As regular readers know, I shovel ever-increasing quantities of seed down the throats of whatever birds deign to visit the table on our deck. Most of the freeloaders that show up are Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (they even outnumber the pigeons!), and I’ve shot video of them before. But it only now occured to me that I could clamp the camera onto the table and go away.

So that’s what I did.

This is before the full afternoon mob showed up, so it’s relatively civilised.

Same table, most of the same cockatoos, a little further away.

And now, the afternoon rush!

It gets a bit samey toward the end, there, but I laughed every time another huge beak filled the screen, so I let it roll.

(I swear one of ‘em tries to say “cock a doodle doo” at 5:44.)

Here in Australia, we’re famous for giving things, places and creatures goofy names.

I mean, just pick one letter. Wagga Wagga. Wallabies. The Wollemi Pine. Wollongong.

(And when Monty Python did their sketch about the Bruces from the University of Woolloomooloo, Australia, the silly-named place they chose was actually not some tiny town in the boondocks, but a spot in the middle of Sydney.)

So, when a rather rotund bird I’d not previously seen showed up at our feeding table, I was optimistic.

Surely, this plump creature with its habit of thrusting out its neck comically would have a ridiculous name.

Could it, perhaps, be a Wonga Pigeon?

Wait - perhaps it was a Wompoo Fruit-Dove!

But then I found out that this white-headed pigeon is actually… a White-headed Pigeon.

Oh well. Can’t win ‘em all.

Our back deck ceased to be a restaurant for birds several months ago. I decided it was time to put out some seed again.

As usual, $US10,000 worth of brightly coloured beasties turned up shortly afterward.

Along with the usual Sulphur-cresteds and rosellas, this time we got a couple of galahs.

We’ve had a galah or two hanging around the seed before, but I never got any photos of them. They’re pretty birds, and relatively reserved when there are only a few around. Get a few hundred of them in one place, though, and they turn into one of the world’s premier sources of frivolity.

(”Galah” is also a somewhat archaic Australian colloquialism for a fool. The birds haven’t really earned that, but I believe the boobies deserve to have their complaint heard first.)

Galahs have a crest, but it’s not nearly as impressive as that of the Sulphur-crested. As with the big cockatoos, they raise the crest when excited.

These two got to spend quite a while with their crests up…

…because the bigger birds, as usual, insisted on pointlessly bullying them.

This sort of inter-species animosity is one of the reasons why conservationists don’t actually much like backyard bird feeders. An unnaturally large and reliable food source in one very small area forces different bird species to rub shoulders, and they never seem to enjoy that very much.

They never actually seem to come to blows, though. Even when the notoriously aggressive currawongs show up and start staring down the cats through the window, the other birds just give them a wide berth and come back later.

And now, I am pleased to present…

…a variable-geometry cockatoo.

Mickey isn’t actually very interested in cockatoos, on account of how large and alarming they are. When he startles them and they blast off to the safety of a nearby tree, he often seems as surprised as them.

That doesn’t mean they don’t feel the need to keep a careful eye on him, though.

(Previously. All bird posts.)

Well, probably not that sad, really. Katoomba birds are used to living in a cloud (as are Katoomba people).

They still look all damp and miserable, though, which may or may not increase the amount of seed they manage to scam from us.

Taken through a window with the C6.

Here’s the cockatoo video I briefly linked to the other day. I think it’s a boy; apparently the only visible difference is that females have red-brown eyes, and males have darker brown. I’ll call it “he”, anyway.

This clip serves as a pretty good test of the VPC-C6’s exposure control. White bird against bright sky isn’t as bad as black bird against bright sky, but it’s not much easier.

Note also that when there’s very little background noise, you can clearly hear the C6’s autofocus ticking away to itself. The zoom’s completely silent, though.

Crest action!

As I mentioned before, they walk like policemen with their hands behind their backs.

They’re quite noisy eaters, at least when they’ve got seed to crunch.

Note that there’s also no guarantee that a seed that makes it into the beak will subsequently go down the gullet.

I think that may be why they do this. Grab beak with foot to keep seed in place while you crack it.

They certainly don’t need foot assistance to actually crack the seed; parrots in general have beak strength to spare, as many people who have stuck their finger through the wire of a cage that has a sign on it saying DO NOT STICK YOUR FINGER THROUGH THE WIRE will be able to confirm.

This is a Crimson Rosella (another male - Rosellas are easier to tell apart).

In an act of staggering audacity, this Rosella is considering eating some of the seed, too.

(The sun comes out from behind a cloud at the end of this clip, and the bright white cockatoo is gloriously overexposed. This was because I’d set the C6 to ISO 100 while fiddling with it. Setting it back to auto-ISO allowed it to compensate for the extra light.)

The cockie was nervous about me standing there, and had hopped off the table to peer at me from further away. Now he’s back, engaging in more foot-assisted eating, and ignoring the Rosella completely.

When the cockie thinks he might actually miss out on some seed, though, things change.

Anybody with a bird feeder cannot escape the disappointing realities of bird behaviour. They may look all soft and colourful and pretty, but they by and large do not get on. Even within one family group, most birds seem to spend a lot of time trying to make sure other birds don’t get anywhere near the food. I’ve watched one parrot guard food diligently for minutes on end, with the result that nobody gets to eat any - not even him.

(Or her. They all do it. And yes, maintenance of the pecking order does involve quite a lot of pecking.)

Remember, all of that tweeting and chirping actually means “This is mine! This is mine! Bugger off! Bugger off! Wanna root? Wanna root?”

After he’d finished eating, the cockatoo repaired to the trellis again, and I pestered him some more. Make funny noises at cockies and they’ll usually oblige you with some neck-bending.

This was shot from maybe four feet away; he didn’t let me get really close.

No wonder the seed disappears so fast.

(There were actually seven of them hanging around, but no more than five could cram in around the seed tray.)

The other day, for no immediately obvious reason, there was a kookaburra sitting on our railing.

(A Laughing Kookaburra, by the way, not the less common and less cuddly Blue-Winged version.)

Birds, we get plenty of. Kookas, we don’t, because we don’t put out the right food.

There’s a house further up the street that always has a kooka or three sitting on the power lines outside. My Holmesian deductive skills lead me to believe that the people who live there feed the kookas.

That’s easy enough to do; just put out bits of meat and kookaburras, who are happy to eat pretty much anything that’s not a boring old plant, will gobble them up.

Kookas do not do well on a diet heavy in the steak-bits that humans like to feed them, but occasional meals of pretty much any live or dead animal go down nicely.

This one had decided to try our house out instead. It was a female, I think, on account of the lack of blue colouration on wings and tail.

Anyway, I first went out there to snap some shots of the bird with my old-ish 100-300mm. That wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped.

Oh, I took pictures of the bird just fine. But the minimum focus distance for the 100-300 is 1.5 metres, and I had some trouble getting that far away from this kookaburra. She seemed happy enough with the lens more or less clinking up against her beak.

It wasn’t really a normal bird-lens kind of situation.

So I switched to my cheap Phoenix macro.

Yeah, that’s better.

Many kookaburras have been hanging around people long enough that they’ll eat out of your hand.

It’s up to you to decide whether that’s a good idea.

I took a lot of pictures of this kooka, then figured I ought to say thank you with at least a bit of food. Nothing in the pantry really screamed “kookaburra food”, but there was some cat food with fish chunks, which looked like a decent bet.

It met with her approval.

I initially tried offering her a spoonful of it. I only just managed to get the spoon back.

Kookaburras aren’t really built to eat cat food, even the lumpy kind. So a significant amount of the fish ended up just messing up her beak. And the railing.

That was because kookas instinctively beat their food on hard objects, to make sure it’s dead. They do this with any food you give them, which means you’ll get sprayed with tiny bits of fish if you give them cat food.

Kookas also, like other birds, have a nictitating membrane, or “third eyelid”, which they deploy to protect their eyes when they’re doing something dramatic, like bashing their food.

The translucent membrane gives the bird a dead-eyed zombie look.

Cats have third eyelids too, but they at least have the decency to close their outer eyelids before they close the membrane, so you usually only see a bit of it retracting away as a sleepy cat opens its eyes. If you see a cat with its eye mostly open and the nictitating membrane clearly visible, then it is probably not a healthy cat.

The kookaburra hasn’t been back for another feed. I presume whatever they’re getting up the street is better.

We put out bird seed on the table on the deck at the back of our house. This has resulted in

1: Bird crap all over the deck
2: Bird seed sprouting into grass all over that area, crowding out some pot plants
3: Birds.

Most of the birds that turn up are Crimson Rosellas, along with…

…a selection of King-Parrots. Male King-Parrots have the reddest-looking feathers in the universe, because they’ve actually got a bit of Day-Glo orange mixed in there. Rosellas are brightly coloured birds, but they look downright dowdy compared with King-Parrots.

Fairly often, though, there is a great beating of small-to-medium-sized wings followed by a sound vaguely suggestive of pterodactyls. Because the Sulphur-cresteds have shown up.

The Sulphur-crested Cockatoo is, like the smaller parrots, common pretty much everywhere on the populated Australian coast. They’re still impressive buggers, though, with an average weight of more than 800 grams (Urban pigeon: 200 grams. Bald eagle: 4000 grams) and a tourist-startling screech (MP3) roughly as loud as a chainsaw. Fortunately, they only visit our little bird feeder in single-digit numbers, or they’d have dismantled the whole back of the house by now.

Smaller parrots (cockatoos are not technically parrots, but they’re very similar) walk as if their feet are on little wheels going round and round. Sulphur-cresteds are big enough that they walk like policemen with their hands behind their backs.

It is my theory that a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo flips up its crest whenever it has a thought.

They have a lot of thoughts when they’re trying to deal with the weighty issues raised by the presence of a seed bell and of a person taking dodgy photographs of them through the living room window.

Sometimes they remind me of Eric Idle.

When Sulphur-cresteds are a bit chilly and aren’t eating, they fluff up their facial feathers and completely change their expression.

Combine face-fluffing with the bendy stretchy crest-flicky stuff they do when they’re staring down a human being, and you get endless entertainment.

Fun Fact: Commercial seed blocks for birds - and, probably, for rodents and other such creatures - are held together with ordinary PVA glue.