Birds and bees

We have remarked previously that birds are frequent visitors to our garden, heading for different trees according to the season. Most have their can't-see-me brown feathers on but for some reason many of our regulars, mainly cockatoos and parrots, are so brightly coloured that they would be startling if they were not so common a sight.

Here's a few pics.

The sulphur crest is a very familiar sight in (or above) our garden, and often the cockies are in this pose, tearing branches off trees around the suburbs, in this case our pistachio before the fall of the leaves in autumn. They sometimes appear singly but in more open spaces are usually in flocks of fifty or so.

Conversely, the pink and grey galahs are ground feeders, and turn up in ones and twos. This one is not in our garden but quite friendly and unafraid of my approach as I walked through the local playgrounds to the shops.

Back in the pistachio the parrots (this one is a crimson rosella) find the nuts tasty. They come in red and blue, red and green, green and red.

The eastern rosella and lorikeets have another range of bright colours some of which are recorded in earlier posts.

Winter is pretty quiet for floral colours but of course, as in any part of the world,they are there if you look. Late winter here is blessed with thousands of violets that spread unnoticed during the summer into unusual corners. I found these in the local park while chatting to the galah featured above. They were flowering profusely, perhaps not elegaically 'blushing unseen' as Gray would have it: yet the boys and girls playing football in the nearby fields were paying no heed.

Who knows, though - perhaps a young person wandered over while supposedly listening to the soccer coach's harangue and found pleasant diversion.