Seen in my garden

By Sydney Sue, 3 April 2004

We are so lucky here in New South Wales, as we get a wide selection of the most beautiful birds on earth.

I’ve always fed them, even though it cost me a fortune in parrot seed and honey, and ground mince for the meat eaters etc. But since I moved I stopped it and planted the native trees which feed them, and only occasionally do I put out bread and honey.

We see wedge tail eagles and hawks, as we have a lot of native reserve around us. Then we have the most famous and my personal favourite, the laughing kookaburras, and they will take meat out of my hand. They are really fat and fluffy and will let me stroke them, or cup them in my hands. The magpies are everywhere and although people aren’t fond of them, because they do occasionally attack humans especially after they’ve got young ones, they sing beautifully.

Then there are the multi coloured parrots, lorikeets, and eastern rosellas and rosellas, which are entirely different. Parakeets, and cockatiels, and the larger sulphur crested cockatoos, and also black cockatoos, and galahs. Then there are the tiny finches, and they too are multi coloured, and then the honeyeaters, which come in all sizes and colours, and they are quite tame. We have a regular nightly visit from a barking owl, he sits on the very crown of the clothes hoist, and catches anything that dares to move.

We have a regular visit from at least one very big koala, and lots of possums, and they love bananas, trouble is they take a bite out of each one, rather than just eating the one. Our other inhabitants are the blue tongue lizards, and we have lots of babies now as well. We often see very large goannas, on the native reserve at the end of our street, and occasionally a wallaby, which is a smaller version of kangaroo.

We also have fruit bats in our trees at night. They fly over in their thousands, in fact it takes about an hour from them first appearing until the end, it’s a remarkable sight.

And I almost forgot to mention that last winter, after a couple of really wild and windy days/nights, I opened my front door, to find a little tern huddled in my porch. I rang the wildlife rescue service, they came immediately, and the guy said that it was quite rare to see them away from the beaches. He thought it would survive after a good rest, as it wasn’t injured, just exhausted. I’m just glad that my Billy cat always slept inside, else the ending would have been very different!

I’m a great lover of all birds and wildlife, and this is heaven for me.