Kookaburras come to call in Rosedale
We get a lot of visitors at our beach house on the southeast coast of Australia.
Aunt Esther gave us a thick visitors’ book not long after the house was completed in the early 1990s. There are just a handful of blank pages now. Plus there are four shoeboxes full of homemade napkin rings.
I love cloth napkins, so get each visitor to make a napkin ring, using a cut-down toilet paper roll and lots of glitter, textas (markers), crayons and such. Then everyone gets issued a napkin that’s used for the duration of their stay. Note to self: do a picture parade of memorable napkin rings.
That said, I can’t get all the visitors to make one. This pole house in the trees is a popular spot for all sorts of wildlife. We’ve seen kangaroos, echidnas, goannas, sugar gliders, possums and a whole range of birds.
This last weekend, two laughing kookaburras landed on our front deck. They popped in two days in a row and spent both afternoons chuckling and looking hungry. I admit that we fed them a bit of leftover chicken. I assured them that it would taste just like ‘snake’.
Besides being good laughers, kookaburras (also known as kingfishers) are carnivores. They usually eat mice, snakes, insects, small reptiles and smaller birds, but are also quick to steal meat off an unattended barbecue.
Our visitors were still sitting on the deck railing the day I left to drive back to Canberra. I rather hope they haven’t stayed to peck away at the cedar window frames. As cute as they are, it’s still another offence they commit.
P.S. I was about a metre away from the birds when I took these photos.
Where to next? 
Kookaburras are mischievous birds from what I have read with a rather annoying loud song. In the US… I reckon the equivalent would be Crows or Bluejays. Those are mean and aggressive and very clever.
For our USA friends who may not have ever had the joy of hearing a Kookaburra… if you have ever seen a Tarzan jungle movie you know what they sound like.
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Thanks for that Potsie! These two birds gave us a few good laughs, but mostly stuck to lengthy chuckles.
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Kings of the Bush – my absolute favourites…
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I love all the Aussie birds.
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We wake up to the sounds of these silly buggas too! They are beautiful in the Daintree and in the rainforest …U-N-I-Q-U-E like YOU! WHOO HOO!
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Thanks Joanne. We always hear them at the coast, but not always in Canberra. I love their sound.
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Beautiful photography Peggy , such detail,
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Thanks so much. I certainly owe my thanks to the kookaburras who stayed so near and posed and posed and posed. I took about 50 pics, but resisted posting them all. 🙂
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I think Kookaburras are great birds, and dam really clever, I had one that liked bacon rind, he would beat it to death then eat it, these are great alarm clocks as well
But to be really honest my favourite bird in Oz was the king parrot (if you fed them regular they got upset if you were late and let you know about it)
The Lorikeets are just so dam cheeky, its hard to believe they are wild birds (or supposed to be)
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Yep, kookaburras sure love to ‘kill’ their bacon rind. I love king parrots too. We saw some at the coast last weekend, but I wasn’t quick enough to get a pic. Magpies are good and so are the galahs. Oh heck, I love all of Aussie’s bird life.
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Noisy bird haha! But I remember there was a bird song that sounds like from a UFO movie I just don’t remember the name of that bird. It sounds eerie and that you can hear early morning. I do miss our friend’s place in Gympie, Brisbane. So many sounds there I never heard before.
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We are lucky to hear a lot of bird songs in Australia. I wonder what UFO-sounding bird you are thinking of?
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It’s the sound that you can hear from the old UFO movies. I realized that bird has the same sound. We were in Gympie a few hours away from Brisbane. Since then I never forget that bird sound.
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I think Kookaburras one of the best birds in Oz, (but then again there are more colourful birds)
But for cheek and friendliest, this is your bloke, a bit of bacon rind, you got a friend for life
This was the last bird I saw on my first trip to Oz and the first one I saw when I went back years later
I saw a lot of youngsters on my second trip, always looked like they had a dust up or covered in mud
But my favourite bird is the butcher bird (its a terrible name for such a friendly bird, he sat on my laptop and just watched me
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I never tire of watching and listening to the birds in Australia. I can see why you’d be partial to butcher birds. They have a beautiful song.
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