Spring - and a young bird's thoughts turn to love.

Pretty in pink - the inlet just before sunrise

 Seems to me I have to revise my statements about birds every day that I am here. Yesterday I said something about birds of a feather sticking together – lorikeet with lorikeet, rosella with rosella and so on. Well… I’ve just watched what I can only assume is a very confused brush wattlebird courting a kookaburra! This is the same kookaburra, I believe, that has been hanging around the flat for the past week. The one who took the sausage. 

So - I'm making a big assumption here, given how wrong the birds keep proving me, but it appears this curmudgeonly kookaburra is a girl bird, and she's been receiving lots of attention from a randy brush wattlebird

This morning the magpies tried to exact revenge for Wednesday’s indignity, and the kookaburra flew away momentarily. When it returned, it sat on the feeder box and fixed me with a beady stare – I was sitting inside the flat at the time – and then flew into the window with a clunk that sent it plopping to the ground. It picked itself up and laughed a self-deprecating kookaburra laugh (“Aw crap, can’t believe I just did that, heh heh”) before hopping back into the tree.

And that’s when the wattlebird started doing its courting dance, fanning its tail feathers, prancing and bowing and bobbing its head, and trying to move itself into a position to, er, consummate the relationship. Imagine a Jack Russell terrier trying to lurve a Labrador, or Charlie Chaplin and Xena, Warrior Princess – that’s what it was like. When the kookaburra spurned his advances and flew away, he followed close behind, trying to mount her during flight (positively scandalous!) The pair of them have been back to my tree since then and repeated the performance, so I know it wasn’t a one off. Is this inter-species lurve commonplace in the bird world, I wonder?

A more conventional couple yesterday – a pair of rainbow lorikeets – had me blushing while I was outside feeding the king parrot. Kingy & I have become good mates now – he cosied up to me as he nibbled sunflower seeds from my hand, and the rainbow lorikeets, not game to get close enough to steal the seeds, decided to bonk each other instead, right in front of me. I felt I should avert my eyes, but it was all over in about 5 seconds anyway. Ain’t spring grand?

I put the SOLD sign there myself!

 While the birds have been courting and bonking, I’ve been sorting out my entry into capitalist pigdom, and can make the following report: so far, so good! My modest 2 bedroom cottage with massive shed and lovely gardens, overlooking farmland and bushland, now sports a SOLD sign out the front - I helped put it there myself yesterday. As it’s an investment property, I can’t actually 'live the dream' in it for 12 months, so I’ll be looking to rent it to holidaymakers over the next year. Set well back from the road 3kms out of Mallacoota, it’ll be a quiet place to stay, even at peak times of the year, and with heaps of parking space, Mr Fisherman will even have room to park the boat. I’m in the process of getting a managing agent to take care of that side of things for me. Settlement is on 9 December, so I’m going to have to work fast to get it set up to receive guests over Christmas. What an adventure!