My horses don't like lorikeets. I planted a couple of apple trees 20 years ago. They were nice apples, but I got a bit chary about all the sprays for fruit fly, so stopped. For a few years I would get half a bucket full of fruit fly stung apples for the horses, every day for about 6 weeks.

Enter the lorikeets. They eat the quarter grown apples as they hang on the trees, leaving just a shriveling core hanging there. There are dozens of them, & a few king parrots to help them. Poor horses.

I had no idea there were different types of crows Luddy. As a boy from sheep country, where the damn things would peck the eyes out of new born lambs, all I ever see, when a crow is about is a target.

Don't ever believe that rubbish about crows being smart either. Cunning yes, smart no. They appear at my lemon tree occasionally, where they will peck a lemon, decide it's sour, then try the next, until all are ruined, if not disturbed. Never go near the Mandarins though. Pity that yellow belly black snake got the small dog, she used to chase crows & kangaroos. Never brought one back mind, but did chase them.

Then there's the maggies & butcher birds, all of whom demand to be fed cat food, when all the domestic animals are fed. At present there are 3 fledgling maggies & five I think butcher bird fledglings.

I think feeding them helps protect the blue wrens nesting in the asparagus fern. I'd chop that horrible stuff out, if the wrens didn't need it's protection.

I would hazard a guess at their next move – stealing garden gnomes and heavy objects of all sorts and taking them up to considerable heights and dropping them on the rooves of houses and cars and the heads of dogs, cats, cattle and children.

I’ve also heard that the currawongs in the area are very displeased with humans. So the crows may well call on them to assist. And the magpies… and butcherbirds…

The eye-pecking of lambs and calves and the destruction of fruit while on the tree and all sorts of other tactics will escalate.

I reckon they’ll strike up a partnership with their traditional enemies, other original Corvallians such as the members of the lorikeet, parrot and cockatoo family!

It’s just a matter of time before those moronic humans are forced out.

Excellent, Ludwig,

....but I reckon Daphne Du Maurier beat you to it.

http://www.enotes.com/birds

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes to the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited except for the boids. He kept boids. Dirty... disgusting... filthy... lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit out on the stoop of the lodge like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Boids!... You get my drift?

Last night I dreamt I went to Craggy Island again....(feckin' bords...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx4nN0HkByg

I saw something the other day that will stay with me for a long time.

I was passing a group of flats --one of those Stalinist era developments with a grid a four, two storey unit blocks, and a generic landscaped garden , inhabited by never to be glimpsed residents -- when I head this unholy screeching. I looked across to see an injured rainbow lorikeet cowering under one of the hedges. A large crow had the tip of its wing in its beak and was endeavoring to drag it from its flimsy cover. And looking on from nearby trees waiting for the life and death tug-of-war to play-out, was a posse of six other large black birds (a mix of crows and currawongs)

What made the tableau vivant poignant was the impassive demeanor of the big birds. And, that it was being acted out straight up against the wall of a block of units in the heart of our biggest city –but seemingly no one was aware of it.

P.S. If you remove the asparagus, I urge you to replace it with a thicket of some sort.