BIRDS!!

It's been a wonderful thing to sit at the breakfast table and watch them all eating ..
everything from king parrots, magpies, peewees (magpie larks), crimson and eastern rosellas,
the odd grass parrot, galahs, cockatoos, gang-gangs, currawongs, crested pigeons, mynahs to bronzewings.

One year we had a group of female satin bowerbirds came to feed.. a great event!
.. then the following year some mature males arrived and we discovered
that we had a bower behind a bush over in a quiet corner of the garden.

We were lucky enough to take photos of young males and females in and around the bower.

The young male satin bowerbirds (with only a few dark blue feathers,
in the bower one of them built in my backyard!
They were in fierce competition about who actually owned the structure!
One of them would appear at the top of the fence
with something blue in his mouth, drop it to the ground
...only to have the other (with puffed up feathers and very agitated) pick up the blue peg,
or whatever and throw it out of sight! This continued for several hours.