Kookaburras
I was walking about my garden. Sometimes I walk and think. This time I was just walking. I glanced up at the windows of my study and was disturbed to see that inside the widows, my pictures, model boats, and pieces of memorabilia were all in a mess and some were on the floor. As I had been working in the study just an hour previous, without any evidence of disturbance, I was puzzled. Walking into the study solved the puzzle. There was the culprit: a young kookaburra fluttering against the glass.
I knew him, a young adolescent larrikin who belonged to a family on our small acreage. I grasped him in two hands and took him outside to release him. He squawked with unbelievable rancour. As I stood in the doorway I was dive-bombed by several adult kookaburras, two of which landed on the guttering above my head in a menacing fashion. Another dozen flew in as reinforcements. I threw the young one into the air and he fled to the safety of a tall eucalypt nearby. He was joined by his whole family, and they broke out into a mocking chorus of laughter.
I know the family well and their mocking attitude is trying my patience. A few years ago my son Peter made some good breeding boxes for kookaburras. We fixed them thirty feet up some tall eucalypts.
They had a deep and dark hollow much like the recess in a hollow branch. The entry was a small hole covered by some soft wood. A parent kookaburra would chew at it with its strong beak and enlarge it until it was just big enough to admit an adult kookaburra, but prevent entry by cockatoos and other dangerous birds.
A pair made their nest and life on our property. Kookaburras mate for life, living often for twenty years. They stay within their territory and proclaim it first thing every morning to everyone who will listen. They know their territory and do not fly outside of it. They mark their territory like a dog marks every corner fence post.
The female lays three or four eggs. The male takes turn in incubating the eggs. When hatched the young are fed by both parents who mush up a mixture of worms, insects, little skinks and any other flesh. The Kingfishers, to which kookaburras belong, are carnivores and the adults eat anything that creeps, squirms or crawls. They will eat small snakes, mice, large insects and small birds. And of course they will dive for fish. I have seen them dive into our dam and fishpond and fly up with a large fish in beak.
They are the most social of birds. When digging in the garden they will sit within centimetres of the spade to be the first to grab a worm. While we are sitting at the outdoor table for a meal, they will fly down and sit beside us, and even hop up to the plate. I have seen one attempt to take a steak from the barbecue while it was cooking. When we hatch chickens and ducklings we keep them locked up for a few weeks to keep the little ones safe from the kookaburras.
They are not good examples of table manners for grandchildren who are only too delighted to feed them. They will gulp down their food, leaving half of it hanging outside of their beaks. They bang their beaks on a bough and rub the hanging food up and down. Then they throw their heads back, gulp it all down in one gulp and shake their heads from side to side. Very bad table manners indeed.
Normally they love high boughs of trees from which they survey the ground for any sign of life. Once seen the kookaburra drops straight down from its perch, its wings back, with beak ready to grab its dinner. Large prey items like lizards and snakes are then bashed against a tree or a rock, to kill them and soften them up before they are eaten.
Regretfully I have noticed that since we started encouraging the kookaburras, every small finch has disappeared from our property. After a month the young has brown and white and maybe some blue feathers. They then start diving from high branches into the mulch beneath our trees and bushes for something they have seen moving. They are already hunters.
The family that laughs together stays together. The young practise from an hour before sun-up, starting with their raucous and mocking laughter when the first colour comes into the eastern sky. That is our wake-up call every morning. They remain until the last colour disappears from the night sky. The young stay close to their parents and next year when more young are hatched they will also help feed them.
Usually only the dominant male and female mate. But eventually the young will pair up with a mate for life and find a new nest for themselves. Behind our place is a huge eucalypt with a large black termite nest up high. Several have dug into the black hard nest, and made an entrance and burrow. A half-dozen young families have thus moved in, like occupants of an urban high-rise block of flats. Each has defined their territory and we now have fourteen as the extended family.
They all laugh together every morning and evening. Aborigines said that their calls would wake the spirit of the sky who would light the flaming ball of the sun until the kookaburras signal the coming of darkness.
Kookaburras are known for their unusual call that seems to be like rather mad human laughter mocking those who listen. They are marking their terrritory. While the birds are confined to a small area of our part of the world, I often wondered as a child when I saw the “Tarzan” films in the cinema as a boy, to hear kookaburras laughing in the African jungle!
Although there are quite a number of species of kookaburra they are all basically the same with strong beak, a flat top head with a crew-cut. They are stout and squat with a strong tail that sticks up at right angles to the body. The larrikin in my study had gained entry through a door temporarily left open and like all larrikins made a mess.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
