WmTrevor,

Surely that should be "Fried Green Famingoes", (or "pink" when they're fully ripened)

I'd blame Spooner - but a slum coloured poking jacket is even better than a town bound drain, IMO....(my cousin once regailed me with a very funny spoonerism after a trip to Cottesloe - she saw "Alan Dond walking his bog" : )

Grrrr...and double grrrrr - that should be "flamingoes".

Thanks Poirot. I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’, based on Du Maurier’s book many years ago.

I thought about that when I read the opening post. What happened in that movie at Bodega Bay in California is just starting to happen at Corvallis. Only difference is that that was fiction while this is real!!

I passed through Corvallis earlier this year. It struck me that the great number of crows and ravens were particularly noisy and rambunctious. It felt very spooky when the crows started to gather around me in large numbers while I boiled the billy, with no other people anywhere around. Then suddenly there was this considerably larger one with a much deeper voice, a relict raven, on the picnic table right in front of me, looking as though he had some serious eye-pecking on his mind!

I let them all know that I had a pot of boiling water at my fingertips, ready to throw in their faces. I reckon that if I hadn’t done that, I could have been in real trouble!

I did say 'Australian rewrite' so shouldn't it be "Fried Green Dingos"? But I'm not from the deep north and despite twitching I'm not that into birds. Maybe someone who has encountered scrub-birds and thrush; or eaten meat on a skua or tasted a cockatoo could suggest an alternative?

Re 'grrrr'... as I said, Titivillus.

Sure it wasn't the Tippi Hedren-style wig Lud?

Mangoes banging on a tin roof. Yes Haz, that’s a classic sound in the older suburbs in our tropical towns.

But it ain’t boids that do it. Tis them flocculating floiying floxxes!

I reckon that’s where the crows the idea!

On your currawongs Luddy, I'm not a fan of them either.

I was chatting to a big rough tough mechanic in the workshop of a Whitsunday's resort island one day. He had just welded up a Y of water pipe. Asked what it was for he said it was a catapult to get the currawongs.

Asked why he pointed to the roof trusses, from which hung a number of those beautiful teardrop nests of the little sun birds. These he'd surrounded in large chicken wire enclosures to protect them from the currawongs he was going to get.

A greeny type roustabout piped up that he couldn't do that, the currawongs were just doing what came naturally.

Our mechanic first agreed, but than said, "yer, your right, but you see, I've got news for those currawongs". "I'm part of nature too, & I don't like the bast4rds".

I liked that island. The owner had cup hooks screwed into the ceiling of his & 2 other offices. There were 3 active sun bird nests in his office alone. The louvers were always left open to give the birds access, & they were safe in there.

Those sun birds sure knew which part of nature was likely to be friendly to them.