Jun 13, 2007

Sighting

I REALLY shouldn't be taking anytime from my planning for placement (which I'm on now by the way) as I'm way behind at moment.

However I need yet another brain retuning break and this won't take too long.

For a while now I've heard rumours and "legends" of unidentified birds that live in the botanic garden beside Salmond. There were said to be unmistakable from the local birds (which is saying something we have a LOT of different bird types here in Dunedin alone). They are VERY colourful parrot looking, and just look like they belong somewhere tropical.

Yesterday while walking through the park with my camera, an odd coincidence caused solely by a skool project I was scrambling to finish, I saw the fabled garden birds... two of them in fact.
_

More amazing was the fact that one of them flew away and landed on a "close" by tree and remained their while its companion disappeared from view. Knowing that if these were like other rare sightings such as Bigfoot or loch ness I needed to fire off my blurry photos THEN!

As you can "see" I got two of any use.

Sadly I won't be making a million dollars from globe weekly news. The birds it turns out aren't as mysterious as student fables would led one to think. Asking Scott he promptly told me these are some escaped Australian parrots from the Aviary. Which is funny enough located in the Garden. Despite this they are now on their 2nd or 3rd generation none the less which is kind of impressive.

An odd anomaly in my otherwise work intensive life at moment so I thought I'd share it. Speaking of work need to get back to it...

3 comments:

California Will said...

where ever parrots are introduced, they do really well. Except Canada. Canada is the exception to most tropic invasion.
I managed to get a decent pictue of a few parrots near me. Most of the time they fly in such a way that they are perpetually backlit. Great for silouettes, bad for ID.

Peter Bond said...

Good birdspotting mate! Did you hear about that HUGE oviraptorid found in China? Like 28 feet long! Could be the largest (by a lot!) feathered dino yet (no feathers found though...)

Anonymous said...

Sorry to disappoint you. But the parrots are not from the aviary, but from an early shipment of birds that weren't allowed into Dunedin. So the ship released the birds as it was leaving the harbour.