In Australia, parakeets are called budgerigars ... and there are zillions of them. This isn't something I saw when I was a kid but that was because my family lived in the middle of Sydney and that's the biggest city in the country.
We did get out back sometimes and only Doc would remember going out to a sheep ranch. I've never been to a sheep ranch in America and it was an astounding visit for a kid over there. Australian sheepmen are just like American cowboys, the Marlboro Man kind who doesn't just own the hat, he rode a horse to buy it.
Watching them shearing sheep was astonishing because they do it incredibly quickly with their high-power shears. The thing I noticed the most was all the sheep after they had been shorn and how many had cuts on them. We don't need an article on standard practice but, whew, that was a shock for a kid.
The budgies were somewhere else but another hugely memorable thing was riding in the back of a pickup truck while another cowboy was driving a different one and they were rat racing between relatively sparse trees and hundreds ... and hundreds ... of kangaroos.
The kangaroo is so strange just to look at them but watching them at speed is so unusual it doesn't seem it can really be happening. Out back, they're all different sizes and colors and many were pacing the trucks for some odd reason. Watching them all bounding along at quite different rates was one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever seen. Doc should remember that one as well.
This was kicked off by a report on CNN of parakeets in Tokyo and it showed just such a display of budgies in a huge flock. That shows they really do go into cities but I still didn't see that in Sydney.
Maybe some of the sibs will remember the fences which go out into the water of the Sydney Harbor to protect kids while we were swimming. That much may fade away but probably not the sight of shark fins as they cruised by.
The lifesaver (i.e. Australian for 'lifeguard') will have called everyone out of the water at first sight of the shark. That's when the big kids would tell the little ones there was a hole in the fence under the water and sharks could get inside without the lifesaver seeing them. The kids wouldn't go back into the water again after that.
4 comments:
The flocks exist inside Sydney. I dont remember as,a kid but last time I went to Sydney, the downtown parks are full of them. There was one tree down in Circular Quay that was full of sulfur crested cuckatoos probably 100 or more
Pretty cool sight for my kids
That would be a pretty cool sight for me since I have never seen that either! Must have been magnificent!
I remember being hugely impressed as a kid by an enormous flock of flamingos at the Taronga Park Zoo.
Taronga is across the harbor. It was one of the most beautiful parks that I ever visited
More a botanical garden but it seemed kind of taken for granted as most of the parks were like that there
It must have been so sensational to take the kids back to the old homeland and then dazzle them with stuff like that. It dazzles me!
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