This Easter I give thanks for parrots. Oh parrot-God, thankyou for furnishing Australia with an excess of loud, colourful, cheeky, playful birds. Life is beautiful, life is never boring, when we have parrots in our backyards.
I remember re-reading Raoul Slater’s fabulous book Growing up with Australian Birds for the umpteenth time when I was a kid, and in it he talked about the Galah (I think it was a Galah, but it could have been a lorikeet or rosella). Imagine, he said, that the humble Galah was actually one of the world’s rarest birds. People would go crazy over how beautiful it was; about how delicate the pastel pink was, how perfectly contrasted with the grey.
Its a thought which has stayed with me.
Imagine if the Eastern Rosella or Rainbow Lorikeet or Major Mitchells Cockatoo was the rarest bird? The Australian King Parrot or the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo or the Crimson Rosella. Or my personal favourite, the Gang-gang Cockatoo.
Imagine if they went extinct?
And so, how lucky are we to have rosellas, lorikeets, galahs, black-cockatoos and gang gangs as some of our commonest and most visible birds here in Australia. We are truly blessed by the parrot-God (a.k.a. evolutionary and stochastic processes).
Then there are the parrots that you don’t need to imagine. The actually rare ones. Imagine seeing a Scarlet-chested Parrot? A Princess Parrot? The already extinct Paradise Parrot, or the nearly extinct Orange-bellied Parrot?
Probably my most surreal parrot moment came in September 2011 when I was in the mallee of South Australia volunteering with a PhD student who was catching dragons. We had heard on the grapevine that Scarlet-chested Parrots were in the area that year. These are nomadic parrots which roam the Great Victoria Desert and occasionally turn up in the mallee of south-east South Australia. I managed to convince Dan, the PhD student, to let me take a few hours off to try and find the parrots. I’m not sure why he agreed - perhaps because he was a birder too and knew how hard these parrots are to see.
So one morning he dropped me off along a track they had been seen on and I wandered off into the bush. I searched and searched and searched and eventually found a beautiful male who allowed me to sit with him as he ate chenopod. I remember shaking my head at how ridiculous the colours were. The purple-blue face was such a rich deep colour, the chest was scarlet with saturation set to +100, the yellow and green and turquoise so vivid that it was like an assault on my eyes. It was completely over the top. What a crazy bird.
The parrot characters...
(I think I got a bit carried away describing parrots in this section. I’ll put it down to isolation boredom).
Do your eyes hurt after reading this post? Mine do…