One of my favourite movies is called “Birdy”, starring a very young, Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. It is the story of childhood friends of disparate backgrounds who go to Vietnam where the Nicolas Cage character is traumatized by his experiences and regresses to a near comatose state. Mathew Modine is brought in to coax Cage back into the real world using memories of their childhood. Directed by Alan Parker it is an unusual and powerful story. Anyway I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who hasn’t seen it.
The point of this reference is that from this movie I developed a love of birds and ornithopters. I have three cockateels as pets. I used to have zebra finches but they bred so profusely that I set them free. I wasn’t sure about this as I’d heard stories about tame birds not surviving in the real world. As a precaution I bought a chook feeder which I hung from a tree in my back yard and continued to feed my little buds. At first they would come every day, then it was once a week and sometimes they would disappear for awhile but always come back.
The seed I use now is a wild bird mix that contains different sized seed. Every weekend my wife and I would fill the feeder and first would come the Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, the largest of the visitors, followed by the Galahs, the Rainbow Lorikeets, the Adelaide Rosella’s and finally my little marauding gang of Zebra Finches.
Essentially the larger birds eat the larger seeds until only the small seed is left for the small birds. Both a pecking order and a sorting process. Like myself the koala watches over the proceedings and we both think it is a hoot. Better than television.
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