An ode to kookaburras
(Well, apparently an ode is a poem of sorts, but I'm a rule breaker who's really bad at poetry, so today's ode comes in post form (as you do.))
When we first moved, I went on a camp with the school which included a night tenting with friends instead of cabining (which is now a word). When we were tenting, I woke up completely freaked out. There were crazed monkeys in the trees!!! Did Australia even have monkeys? What was going on?!?!
I very quickly learned that they were just kookaburras. Since then, we've had a neighbourhood kookaburra that likes to pop by every once and a while and sit on our fence or The Stick. (Quick story about The Stick. A couple of years ago Mom managed to pick up a tiny frangipani tree, but within a few months it lost all its leaves. We thought it had died, dubbed it The Stick and left it, too lazy to throw it out. It seriously looked like we had planted a stick in a pot. To our delight, we discovered it was just hibernating and had lost its leaves for the winter. It's now almost as tall as me, but we still call it The Stick.)
I've named the kookaburra Nelson (because it was the first name to pop into my head). It took a while, but eventually after repeatedly calling this bird "Nelson" everyone else started calling him that too. (I have power in this household :D) Of course, we've now found out that there are like five kookaburras who hang around our neighbourhood but they're still all Nelson. More recently, we've started differentiating between the males and females with Nelson and Nellie, respectively.
I absolutely adore Nelson. He likes to puff up his feathers and sit there like a cute ball of fluff that I want to hug/squeeze to death, and sometimes he'll just sit on The Stick and watch me as I watch him. (He'll also bang bugs against the fence to kill them and body parts fly, which is simultaneously disgusting and awesome.)
Do you have a favourite neighbourhood animal? What do you think of a kookaburra's laugh (they seem to all like to laugh at like 5am and annoy me to death (not my video, by the way))?
When we first moved, I went on a camp with the school which included a night tenting with friends instead of cabining (which is now a word). When we were tenting, I woke up completely freaked out. There were crazed monkeys in the trees!!! Did Australia even have monkeys? What was going on?!?!
I very quickly learned that they were just kookaburras. Since then, we've had a neighbourhood kookaburra that likes to pop by every once and a while and sit on our fence or The Stick. (Quick story about The Stick. A couple of years ago Mom managed to pick up a tiny frangipani tree, but within a few months it lost all its leaves. We thought it had died, dubbed it The Stick and left it, too lazy to throw it out. It seriously looked like we had planted a stick in a pot. To our delight, we discovered it was just hibernating and had lost its leaves for the winter. It's now almost as tall as me, but we still call it The Stick.)
I've named the kookaburra Nelson (because it was the first name to pop into my head). It took a while, but eventually after repeatedly calling this bird "Nelson" everyone else started calling him that too. (I have power in this household :D) Of course, we've now found out that there are like five kookaburras who hang around our neighbourhood but they're still all Nelson. More recently, we've started differentiating between the males and females with Nelson and Nellie, respectively.
I absolutely adore Nelson. He likes to puff up his feathers and sit there like a cute ball of fluff that I want to hug/squeeze to death, and sometimes he'll just sit on The Stick and watch me as I watch him. (He'll also bang bugs against the fence to kill them and body parts fly, which is simultaneously disgusting and awesome.)
Do you have a favourite neighbourhood animal? What do you think of a kookaburra's laugh (they seem to all like to laugh at like 5am and annoy me to death (not my video, by the way))?
Aw, Nelson is cool! It's too bad they wake you up, but they seem super awesome. :D We don't have anything quite so extraordinary as kookaburras, but we did have a tail-less squirrel called Stumpy a few years ago, who we liked to watch out the window. :)
ReplyDeleteYes, I adore Nelson!!! He's just awesome. Well, a tail-less squirrel sounds pretty cool, too (awesome name, by the way) and that's awesome that he hung around enough for you guys to name him and everything.
DeleteOh my goodness, the kookaburra's laugh is simultaneously cool and disturbing. Nelson is adorable--how close does he let you get to him?
ReplyDeleteIn my old house (I just moved so I have to call it my old house now), we have a chipmunk that lives with its family in the front lawn and we leave bird seed lying out on the driveway for it. My sister and I named it Squibbles, and then we found out there were two and like, a bazillion babies, so we call all the babies little Squibbbles and we call the mum Spectrum, and the dad is still Squibbles. They got to the point where they weren't hugely afraid of me anymore and they would let me get pretty close as long as I didn't make any sudden movements.
I know, right? AND I LOVE NELSON!! Um, we were maybe five or so meters away from him? We used a long lens.
DeleteAwwww, that sounds so cute!!! Hahahaha, that's awesome. Chipmunks are just adorable. That's so cool that you were able to get close to them!