Everybody 'round here uses "Currawong" & "Magpie" interchangeably for the traditional black and white guys that dive bomb in spring - Not sure if this is a "I say Potato, you say relative of belladonna deadly nightshade" thing or not.

We've watched them grow up from chicks through demanding adolescents to adults over the last year.

The pied currawongs are the mostly black guys with the white patch on their tail and their wings.

We're in the NSW Southern Highlands, about 180km south west of Sydney on the fringe of Morton National Park (think something a bit bigger than Rhode Island for our US Friends)

 

Our last house, a

bout 100km north of our current location had lots of Magpies/Currawongs. Most of them were pretty friendly towards people and they were used to bludging from pedestrians on the walking trail around the lake.

I walked up to the local shops one morning - about 3km and one guy hopped over said hello ( not literally, although my grandmother had a per one she taugh to talk) with his usual song and I gave him some seeds, which he happily pecked at. about 3 hours later I walked home and was going past his tree and "bam" in the back of the head. he didn't draw blood, bu the nesting switched had definitely been flipped. I walked the rest of the way home holding a small gum tree branch over my head.

Bike helmets usually look like this here.

 

They look like they're in a zoo!

I've only ever seen them in the wild way out west a few times past dubbo, broken hill and a couple places in theflinders ranges and inland WA, or in pet shops all over the place, of course!

 

Yup, these guys are pretty raucous! You get them pretty much all up & down the east coast, even in quite populated areas.

They usually stay in pretty big flocks of 50-300 or so birds.
There was a loarge flock that liked roosting for the night in the tree outside our old unit in Leichhardt in the inner western suburbs of Sydney years ago - only about 8 km from the CBD and a really big flock used to gather for the evening in the trees around the streets of Chatswood near all the shopping malls - you didn't walk under trees or you'd pretty likely get fertilised!

 

Prior to decnt camera and at our old house, we used to regularly see feather "bits" in the lawn and just kinda mow over them repeatedly - extra mulch and fertilisers.

Just figured with all our trees, things just died and that was nature.

One day we happened to look out the dinning room window and in the yard we could see something that kept bobbing slowly up nad down about the size of a largish chook

The head would go down, stay there for a few seconds and then come up for a few seconds and then down again

After watching this for a while, when went to a different part of the house and got a closer look - still not a great picture, but it turned out to be a local brown hawk and he'd decided that our yard made a nice sheltered dinning room for him

The bobbing was accompanied by suitably red gory bits once we were close.

Now the feather remains we periodically discovered in the yard made sense!

Never saw any wagtail remains, almost always feral critters, indian mynahs and damned pigeons

 

The sound they make is really...well, to shoot them.
About 70 cm of noise in our frontyard

 

Wonderful shots Willem

 

out in the canoe yesterday... about 50 swans in the pond, ridiculously big birds... and then there was the snake in the shrub.... this thing was about the same diameter as a golf ball.... damn near fell out of the boat trying to get a picture!

 

For the longest time this guy was hanging out at my house. He would often be sitting on my truck and generally did not seem to care about me. he would often let me get quite close. Then one day he was just gone. I mean there are tons of these birds around, but none ever get as close as this one did.

 

when you've got a set of hooks like that who do you need be afraid of?

 

There's a golf course nearby that has this fabulous rookery in the middle of the course. Some shots from there:

 

You must be asking about the wood stork. Yeah, you can see the dinosaur in that one...

 

The spousal unit and I were out for a paddle yesterday and stumbled upon this fellow...

he seemed quite pissed that we bothered him for a picture whilst he was fishing!