Something every day.

Winter has been able to point out and say 'bird' for a while now, so I thought it was time to move onto advanced bird spotting, and have started using family names, eg, magpie, crow, seagull, etc, instead of just the generic 'bird'. With some degree of success, as well.

But as we were wandering around Fitzroy Gardens the other week I began to notice a very common bird that I couldn't name. "There's a... bird," I pointed out to Winter. "A... brown bird... with bits of white and black. Look at that brown bird with bits of white and black."

My Dad always taught me that every question had an answer, so I contacted Adrian the avian aficionado, a decidedly non-twitching friend of mine who's knowledgeable about such things, and asked him what that bird was.

"Indian myna, most likely" was his reply. "Introduced, and generally considered a noxious pest for their tendency to tip native birds out of their hollows (i.e tipping the babies out and then taking over – imagine if some introduced species came and did that to you!)"

Well, indeed! And so when Winter and I returned to the Gardens this morning we made sure to flick our arms toward any mynas we saw, saying, "Boo mynas! Go away mynas!" and, though we were mostly ignored, I think we got the message home to a few of them, at least. We were careful, of course, not to say "Go away Indians," as we didn't want to be racist. Particularly at the moment given this whole "monkey" tension between Australia and India. The last thing I wanted during a morning stroll in the park was a race riot.

So, there you go: Indian mynas.