Backyard birds

 

It's just been Backyard Bird Count Week. I did my usual 20 minutes count, and spotted all the usual rainbow lorikeets, noisy miners, sulphur crested cockatoos, etc, and a family of king parrots happened by at just the right time too.

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a rather over-friendly king parrot who came to visit us a few weeks ago.

 

 

And a very big family of rainbow lorikeets.

 

 

 

 

 A tawny frogmouth

And a brown cuckoo-dove I spotted nearby last week. I'd seen these before, without quite getting round to identifying them properly.

Count me!

It's been Aussie Backyard Bird Count Week again, and yours truly has been doing his bit. In my case it involves sitting on my roof (I love my roof), for 20 minutes at a time, noting down all the birds that turn up in my field of view.

It goes like this. Noisy Miner, Noisy Miner, ...........Kookaburra, Noisy Miner, Sulphur Crested Cockatoo, ..........a wattle bird or two, .........and what were those little things flitting overhead so quick?  And then another Noisy Miner.

The results go online immediately, and 2017 statistics can be viewed here:  https://aussiebirdcount.org.au/statistics/

The full 2016 results are here: https://aussiebirdcount.org.au/2016-results/
Australia-wide, the rankings were: 1. Rainbow Lorikeet, 2. Noisy Miner, 3. Australian Magpie. Within New South Wales, it was: 1. Rainbow Lorikeet, 2. Noisy Miner, 3. Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo.

I was rigorous with my timings, and of course found that the most interesting birds appeared just after the 20 minutes was up. Look at this beautiful and amazingly cheeky King Parrot, who turned up yesterday to check out our back patio (and me), during a non-counting period.