CHRISTMAS NUTS TO YOU TOO

From an idea fired by Mark Twain

NOW that Christmas has passed by and the jolly season for birds has been and gone too I feel it might be now safe to talk about them behind their wings so to speak.

I don’t believe we should ever under-estimate the brainpower of birds. They know exactly when and where to give you an early morning call and, it seems, an hour earlier on Sundays. After the Plovers find the most stupid of places to nest and raise their clown-booted booby’s comes the pleasant cackle, cackle, cackle, cackle , the never-ending cackle from baby Magpies which is often good to get your blood racing before breakfast. Why should they be the only ones awake?

Then along with the Magpies, the little Mudpies inevitably stuck to the ceiling by Swallows right outside your front door and immediately below it a dainty little stalagmite of bird shit. But it’s not always on the outside of the house either, one will find beautifully crafted rubbish piles in the most isolated parts of the house, the roof cavity, the rafters in the shed, or if you don’t have rafters the top shelf anywhere will be most suitable. They know where to go for nesting material and some even go as far as stealing it from other birds. But that’s a human trait as well, cheating on their partners sometimes out of spite while others just enjoy cheating in general.

And don’t try artificial nests like I did, that just gave them some more surfaces to shit all over. Best of all birds not to have close to home are the parrots for they not only poo all over wood they eat the stuff from under you as well. And don’t try running them anywhere as they take off from the front of a car in milli-seconds which sort of puts the lie to those dastardly wind-generators killing a species or two doesn’t it.

But the actual breed I’m writing about today is ‘Cacatua galerita‘ which to us mortals is the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo.

The story goes something like this. A young adolescent Cockatoo had been looking all day for a convenient tree-trunk in which to locate a nest. All his life he had been preening his crest ready for the time when he would be attractive to the right bird. One day he spied her across a crowded forest and now he had found her he was not going to let her go. Now he had found her they would have to find a little love nest to ‘plight his troth’ or whatever birds think that is.

He searched high and low until he flew on to a property in Happy Valley with a new little wooden house on it. Yum Yum. Landing on a sill of one of the windows he was hoping to find a place where he could do lots of impressive stunts and acrobatics to impress his bird.

Noting the books and dinner plates, flagons and shovels around the place he thought that amidst this general disorder would be a great place to set up shop with his girlfriend. After all, their droppings would easily get lost in the shit that was already there. It was obvious that they could easily raise an egg or two undisturbed as nobody would know they were there. It was dry, out of the winds and had tons of wood and paper to gnaw away the hours. Flying inside he soon found what humans called PVC pipe laying in a cupboard under a rarely used kitchen sink and he quickly began moving their furniture in. It was sparse at first but he knew he’s found a homely little woman who was capable of making straw curtains and twig beds to cover with the feather doona from her Hope Chest. He wouldn’t even have to go to Westpac for an exorbitant home loan.

All he had to do was gather nuts together for the family to eat, and of course being a keen saver maybe one or two for his superannuation. His financial advisor told him to find a really safe place to deposit them, for, as he said, it’s a dastardly deed when you lose your nuts.

Just behind a door he spied a little hole at the end of a piece of pipe, not large enough to get into but large enough to drop the right-sized nuts down. Not sure of how deep it went he thought he would just start dropping nuts down it until it filled. Surly, as he could not see the bottom of it he could fit a plentiful supply in it. This was not the usual trait of a greedy cockatoo but this fellow was very frugal, some might say tight.

Well to cut a long story short (which is bloody difficult for me) he helped his girlfriend raise a family from the eggs she laid and all that time he kept dropping extra nuts down the pipe which never seemed to fill up. Every day without fail the Cockatoo would deposit his nuts, but what he did not know was that everyday or two the farmer would come along and empty it. The Cockatoo was not aware of the farmers growing anger as the days went by.

Eventually the Cockatoo thought that he should try to check out how much he had saved with his family to use towards Christmas presents. It was time for the family feasting season where they would all get fat and jolly and for which he had been saving so diligently.

He flew to the place and put his eye to the hole to check it how many nuts he had.

It is with great regret that we have to inform dear readers that during that very same day Mrs. Cockatoo and her two children had to attend the funeral of her recently departed partner. She noticed that the coffin was shorter than she expected and realised that her beloved partner no longer had a head to put in it. Later that day the Cockatoo News reported that Bruce Cockatoo had had the misfortune to be looking down a pipe when it exploded and a lump of lead had removed his once beautiful crest along with the bit that held it up from his shoulders.