haha holy shit

[cimorene]

Australians, is it like... expected to wake up to kookaburras going off outside your window or on your balcony like this?

Comments

[copracat]

No, that lot are very fucking cheeky kookaburras. They don't generally hang out on balconies.

But if you are in a bushy area (like Mudgereeba) then they are likely to be among the birds you hear. They're very distinctive.

That guy probably has a bird feeder to attract so many to his balcony.

[cimorene]

Oh, whew! It does seem extreme, but I've learned things that seemed as weird about Australian birds before. (And it was the first result when I searched for videos of kookaburra calls!)

I saw videos of people hand-feeding them, which is understandable because they're so cute, even if it is going to bring a lot of noise your way.

[vass]

No, but in many parts of southeastern Australia you'll be subjected to Parrot Screaming Time at sunrise and sunset.

These arseholes and these colourful fucks are frequent offenders.

[cimorene]

Finding this on YouTube has expanded my world and I don't know if I'm more enthralled, bemused, or grateful that the birds here are so quiet.

They are awfully pretty!

[vass]

Some other Australian bird sounds for you:

The common murderbird, aka Australian magpie, has a very pretty warble. (They're actually very nice birds. Just don't go near their nesting grounds in spring if you like having eyes.)

Boobook, boobook. (It's an owl. Boobook is both its name and the sound it makes.)

Our ravens are not like other ravens. Until just a year ago I didn't know this. I thought all raven caws sounded like ours. Waark, waark, waaaark.

[cimorene]

Hahahah! Thank you, I am loving this! It's funny that no matter how much you think you understand about daily life in a foreign place, there can be details like this that will totally trip you up! I've been friends online with at least 4 Australians for well over 10 years, I think, and read plenty of things about their lives... and I even have heard things about the birds there (like the dive-bombing attack birds!!) without ever conceiving of (a) the noise levels or (b) the huge quantities of bright exotic-looking parrots that are scattered around the way pigeons and seagulls and sparrows are here & where I grew up.

Also I'm incredibly in love with the Boobook owl. OMG.

And incidentally you guys also have my favorite lizards (I love lizards), the Boyd's forest dragon.

[vass]

No, thank you for the opportunity to infodump! It's very cheering. (And I'd love to hear about your own particular local birds, whether in Finland or in your part of America if you feel like sharing.)

Boyd's forest dragon is on the opposite end of the country from me. My area does have blue-tongued lizards, though. (And some very venomous snakes.)

We have sparrows and pigeons and seagulls too. Lots of them. As an introduced species, but yeah, they're all over the place. Also mynahs, which aren't native here either but are common and frustratingly stupid about cars.

The parrots don't just hang around on the concrete waiting for treats like the gulls and pigeons do, they sit up in trees or perch on electric cables or fly around in huge screaming mobs. But if you live near any parkland you can see them spreading out on the grass.

And these are our ducks. They're not fancy, but they're not aggressive or loud either.

Here are some other colourful parrots I live near:
Sulfur-crested cockatoo (the bird you probably think of when someone says "cockatoo")
Galah (also mild and inoffensive Aussie slang for "idiot".)

Some people (particularly if they have a house with a verandah) will throw meat scraps out for the magpies and butcherbirds and kookaburras. When I was a kid, visiting family friends in the country, I'd wake up and hear magpie song and that's how I knew I was in the country. But these days they have a much larger urban population, and now I live in the inner suburbs and wake up to them.

Budgerigars are native to Australia too, but I've never seen them in the wild because their territory's further inland.

Oh, and meet the common bin chicken[*], aka white ibis. I've never actually met one myself, but I have friends who live in areas where they're a common nuisance. I'm not sure if this is the same breed of ibis which a family friend who's a teacher once informed me is the only animal capable of putting its own head up its arse. She was a schoolteacher, and had started referring to the rest of the teaching staff at her workplace collectively as The Ibises for that reason.

(Where I am, the brushtail possum fills the ibises' particular ecological niche. By which I mean rummaging in the garbage. They also enjoy destroying people's gardens and making the dogs way, way too excited.)

Oh yeah, and where you guys have geese to do the job of large and menacing waterfowl, England has white swans and we have black swans. Their swans all belong to the queen, and ours don't belong to anyone but have an auspicing and credentialling agreement with Satan. But according to Wikipedia, a quarter of them are gay, so they're not all bad.

[* cf "rubbish bin", or in American English a trash can.]

[cimorene]

I love all of them!!!

Anyway, I very much appreciate all of this!

I know Boyd's forest dragon has a tragically limited range, but I do remember coming across quite a few species that are native to Australia the last time I was reading about them. I really appreciate how skinks tend to look sort of like grumpy snakes with legs.
they sit up in trees or perch on electric cables or fly around in huge screaming mobs. But if you live near any parkland you can see them spreading out on the grass.

Oh I see, the parrots are a bit like corvids then? I often see groups of crows or magpies perching around up high (as well as small groups of them scrounging on the ground).

I grew up about 8 hours inland from the Gulf of Mexico's coast in northern Alabama, in a climate comparable to that of Tokyo sort of (I think) where azaleas and tiger lilies are very happy, and my dad is a bird-feeder-based watcher. Mostly I noticed a few songbirds around there, and between there and southwest Finland the sparrows and the presence of mid-sized hawks are probably the only real commonality. So I grew up seeing mostly like... sparrows, American robins (the long skinny kind not the fat round kind), cardinals - always the easiest spotted and most fun, chickadees (usually heard rather than seen as the area had tons of trees in a mixture of deciduous and evergreen), and bluebirds and bluejays. Aside from hummingbirds, that is. If you asked my dad he'd probably list three times as many, though, haha. I think the birds I remember and miss the most are actually the herons, especially great blue herons, and the great- and little egrets (which apparently are also herons) that we would see on vacation at the gulf coast and in Miami, though. (There are cranes in Finland, which look very much like herons but aren't related apparently. Nobody with the fantastic hairstyles of an egret, though, which all seem to have fancy head feathers.)

I remember mynahs as well because my grandfather lived in Miami most of my childhood and was a volunteer ranger in the Everglades. (Also from Kipling of course.) I don't think I remembered what they looked like until I read that article though. Seeing the parrots in the wild, I can't help thinking that even the ones I saw in zoos as a child (well... most American zoos, not all) had a very artificial and sub-optimal lifestyle without a flock. Idk, possibly one they're perfectly happy with, but still. I've seen a lot of those sulfer-crested cockatoos in pet stores and zoos and pictures of people's pets, but I was shocked to see those big flocks of them in the videos! I don't think I've ever seen a zoo that only had one parrot alone, but I've definitely seen just one of a species, or just two (though I guess it's common to keep them in a cage with a bunch of other types of birds). I also love the color block look of the Galah and the weird little head and neck shapes.

I have a weirdly vivid memory of first learning what a kookaburra was with the introduction of the nursery song in preschool at some point complete with some really terrible illustrations that I now realize have resulted in a lifelong misapprehension that they were much much bigger than they are. Like in the illustration, my memory is that the bird was about half the size of the tree, like perhaps would occur with a small potted tree. So I've always pictured them sort of... lynx-sized, even after having seen photos (but closeups!). LOL.

I'm also extremely envious of your [as a nation that doesn't include you personally] ability to watch ibises!! I knew ibises were real birds... at least I have known for some time, maybe not when I first was introduced to the world as a small child, but I was definitely more familiar with illustrations than photos until probably adulthood, so I still feel a bit awed by their whole existence.

And the naked-tailed sort of possum was native to where I grew up! It was the sort of thing you would occasionally find because the headlights glanced off its eyes and it was watching us pull into the driveway from up in a tree in our yard somewhere. I've never met a live one up close, however, because they're nocturnal and rather shier than fellow mammalian scavengers like raccoons (a family of which once stole my entire unopened tin of powdered vanilla coffee drink from our campsite when I was a tween).

Finland doesn't have raccoons but it does have the raccoon dog, which looks eerily similar to a raccoon. I encountered its furs when working at the thrift store - I haven't seen one in the wild, but they're definitely there. Probably more of them to be found more inland from us. We're more seagull central here, though we have plenty of urban foxes. There are magpies, hooded crows, and ravens here, and it's kinda cool to see them as often as I do, although I'm a little disappointed the ravens are less common and the hooded crows aren't as gothy as their all-black cousins. The great tit, which I recently learned is a vicious murder machine, and the blue tit are two WONDERFUL cousins of the chickadee who live around here and I'm always delighted to see them, especially because there are no red birds to replace the robin and cardinal and I'm (probably lamentably) shallowly excited by the colorful. You could get a lot more species out of waxjism that I probably fail to identify because they are too similar in size and color and I don't have a birdfeeder to bring them close to the windows.

Oh! But we do have swans here! Geese only in passing, but plenty of swans. And yeah, I gather they're pretty formidable. I have never met one close up though. [ETA: oh right we have geese all summer! But they're not omnipresent and aggressive at any old lake like the geese I knew in childhood; they congregate at a park. The swans go for the sea and because driving routes pass bits of it all the time I see them much more often, albeit not close enough to be threatened.]

[cupidsbow]

Yep. :)

[cimorene]

Oh dear! So is that something you discuss with the weather in areas of heavy kookaburra buildup? Like 'at least it doesn't look like rain, and the kookaburras didn't shout at dawn'?

[cupidsbow]

It depends where you're living, and how frisky the birds are. I live in a place where there aren't as many kookaburras, so it's usually other birds shrieking to welcome the sun, but I have holidayed where the kookas have gone off like that.

I think Australians often don't realise how loud it is because we're used to it, but when I travelled overseas, I'd often wake up in the morning going, "What's wrong?!!!" because it was *too quiet*.

Australia is really unusual in terms of birds, which a lot of people don't know, as the dangerous animals get all the press. But the blurb of this book gives a snapshot: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/where-song-began-australias-birds-and-how-they-changed-the-world-9780143572817

[cimorene]

I am going to read that because it looks amazing, but I can't help thinking it would make an even better nature special. Maybe I can find some related material in not-bird-specific Australian nature stuff though.

[ursamajor]

Oh my god I cannot stop laughing and wincing and boggling all at once.