I'm lucky that I live close enough to be able to walk to work. Some mornings when I'm running late I take a short cut across a tiny suburban park. It's just a patch of green with a playground, surrounded by houses. In the last few weeks the magpie geese have arrived, as I cross the park they take off in an eruption of honking and flapping wings.
I've had a look online, and I don't think they're migratory, I think it's more that by the end of the dry season there's not much left that's green out bush, so they come into town to the watered parks and playing fields.
Down near the beach the nuts are out on the casuarina trees, and the black cockatoos are enjoying them - very noisily and messily - squabbling over each branch and dropping a carpet of nuts and twigs to the ground.
It's hardly surprising that birds keep turning up in my artwork, here's a recent painting I did of a curlew.
Lovely to see some bird photos on Cathy Cullis's blog last week - which partly inspired this post!
Hope you're having a great weekend, we've had some decent rain in the last few days - at last!!- so I'm feeling a bit saner!
Love the Curlew (Bush Thick knee) painting. We are lucky to have so much wildlife right on our doorstep. All the best to you for the New Year.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I saw a couple of curlews in that torrential rain 2 nights ago near the beach - I always feel lucky to catch sight of one. Best wishes for 2015
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