Friday Photo: 12 November
November 12th, 2010 at 9:33 am by ChthoniidHaven’t forgotten, just pretty rushed this morning.
In contrast to our furtive NZ birds, Australian birds are a little easier to photograph. I opened the lens wide to make the head the focal point of the shot.
Click for larger, higher res image
Ok… going to need a lot of coffee this morning. Hope every body has a good end-of-week.
November 12th, 2010 at 9:37 am
Parroting the same old.
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 9:38 am
What a cracker !!!
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Australian birds are amazing. In our neighborhood we have a flock of brightly coloured lorakeets who have picked our bottle brush tree clean, they love the flowers.
There are kookaburras who sit on the lamp posts, if you hear them laughing you know that means rain.
We bought two South American conures, cost about a third what you would pay for something similar in NZ. Hand reared, they are real characters, and love red wine!
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Looks like it should be perched on a pirates shoulder, and squaking “pieces of eight”.
cheers
David Prosser
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
@Pete George
ha ha. Ok, I may have a small addiction…
@david
this type tends to be fonder of fruit.
@Maggie
Yes, there’s something about the brashness and confidence of the Australian birds that I like too. I’ve been hoping to get a red-tailed black cockatoo photo for a while however, without much success.
@DJP6-25
parrots often seem to have an impish side to them
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
I showed it to my parrot and it seemed uninterested… then I realised it’s been raised amongst humans so was probably looking wondering what that weird creature was
Now, when is NZ going to drop its ridiculous restriction on bringing Australian birds into NZ (even if they’re bought through recognised breeders or per shops and even if the owner offers to pay for quarantine) because “they might have bird flu”? AFAIK no Australian native species has been reported as suffering from bird flu and anyway, that was two irrational scares ago… we were all going to die of swine flu after that, remember?
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Actually it’s a 1982 Australian regulation that prohibits the live export of any of its native wildlife. Dead ones- like roo meat or croc leather is fine. Live birds- even if they are as common as dirt galahs, are illegal. NZ doesn’t prohibit the import of birds from other countries. I know for instance, a SA breeder that brings in a lot of stuff from South Africa.
The economic consequence of that is big divergence between foreign & Australian domestic parrot prices. And that price gap encourages smuggling (indeed, it’s like a subsidy to parrot smugglers). One of the staging points for this traffic is NZ. So, we’ve had several “mystery” parrot diseases turn up in the last decade.
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
It’s the Federal Wildlife Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act 1982 that pretty much makes the whole bird-export trade out of Aus illegal.
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
@Chthoniid:
That’s weird, because I contacted the quarantine people in NZ, not the Austraians (as it’s not a protected species I figures the Australians woundn’t care) and the NZ side told me no, and cited bird flu as the reason :-/ (Can’t find the damned email now… it was some time ago that I asked)
What the…??
I seem to recall them saying there was no Import Health Standard in place, which made it doubly problematic, which seems to be confirmed by this press release.
But then how’s your friend managing it?!
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Ah this seems to back up my belief that it’s the NZ end.
The president of the Parrot Society of New Zealand saying “We haven’t been allowed to import parrots into New Zealand since the mid-1990s. This makes our existing birds very precious and it is a real privilege to be able to keep them.”
[I'm not pointing this out to win debating points, but in the hope you might have some advice to help me
]
Vote:November 12th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
I was surprised how easy it was to buy a couple of parrots in Australia. This is a bureaucrats’ paradise, you need a licence for practically everything.
Vote:November 13th, 2010 at 4:09 am
When the Russians briefly invaded East Prussia in 1914, they took one of the Kaiser’s palaces, complete with parrot. They quickly taught it to say very rude things about it’s former master.
cheers
David Prosser
Vote:November 14th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Rex- I’ve been involved with Australia’s absurder rules on the export of wildlife for some years, down to having written papers on it, contributed to a senate inquiry and recently, graded a law PhD thesis on the laws.
If you want to discuss, happy to pick up discussion later.
The laws in Australia do of course, permit a domestic traffic. That’s how the Price conspiracy exploited things for their smuggling into NZ. They simply hired a pilot to fly crates of birds back to a small airfield (Waharoa, near Matamata) in NZ. To obtain the birds, they just bought up stock at a Brisbane pet shop.
Vote: