Australia Has Very Weird Birds

We were only in northern Queensland for five days, but we saw so many unusual birds while we were there. Fortunately, we're not birdwatchers. We have lives. But it was interesting all the same. Under a hot tropical sun, as we lay in the pool, chattering cockatoos flew overhead in pairs, white against the blue bowl. Brightly-colored rainbow lorikeets fed on the seed heads of the strange plants outside our room. It was almost, almost, enough to make us into birdwatchers. But, like I said, we have lives. Whenever possible though, I took a photo of some of these strange birds, and here are a few of them.

A kookaburra: it's sort of the national bird of Australia. They live in groups and generate a lot of noise, sounding more like hyenas or monkeys than birds. Apparently, they can live for twenty years or more, but if there were a group of them near my house, making all that noise, they 'd live for about twenty minutes. Sorry, kookaburras, but it's true.

A hummingbird? Who knows?

We think this bird is some kind of an ibis, but after only a day or two, we decided to call it the Trashbird instead. These things are like rats. Dirty. Furtive. Smelly. One day, we sat on the beach, looking for crocodiles and sharks and jellyfish and snakes, and a Trashbird sat right next to us, waiting for us to finish our lunch. We could smell it from five-feet away. Hot dirty smelly Trashbird. Everywhere we went, we saw Trashbirds digging through trash, disappearing into dumpsters, carrying ripped plastic bags around in their curved beaks. I think this Trashbird even has trash stuck in its beak. Smelly Trashbird.

Here's a cassowary: a large, rare flightless bird that lives in rain forests and eats purple figs and poops out the seeds, helping the rain forest to regenerate, et cetera ad infinitum. They're a bit like emus. They can be aggressive, which might explain why the photo is a bit shaky and out of focus: we were getting prepared to run, or hit it with a camera. Survival of the best armed.

A rainbow lorikeet. This bird is pretty and brightly-colored and it's quiet and doesn't eat trash and isn't dangerous. So we like it. Good job, rainbow lorikeet!