Entry 20
Monday 6th June 2022
12:13pm
NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I have more recently found out that feeding honey is not good for birds, and my mum has since stopped doing so, but some of these older journal entries from 2022 will mention my mum putting out honey for the birds to eat, so please keep in mind that this is no longer something that my mum does.
I forgot to write about this yesterday, as I was very preoccupied with other things, but I saw two new/interesting things yesterday. The first thing I saw was a large fight between three different species of birds. Recently my mum bought a large tub of honey off of our nextdoor neighbour and started feeding the birds again with said honey. As quite a few birds eat nectar (of white honey is kinda similar to), they go absolutely crazy over the honey. But because so many birds will eat honey given the chance, it’s kind of no surprise that they will inevitably start fighting over it. We had two Red Wattlebirds (a breeding pair), the entire family of Blue-face Honeyeaters and two Rainbow Lorikeets (also a breeding pair) fighting over the honey my mum put out for them.
Usually the Rainbow Lorikeets (despite there only being two) will dominate over the honey. From my own observations, they are the most aggressive of the three species, and will successfully chase off other honeyeaters despite the Lorikeets being slightly smaller. Yesterday, however, things changed. The entire Blue-faced Honeyeater family was dominating the food source, attacking and pecking and chasing off the Lorikeets. They even attacked the Red Wattlebird pair, which they usually tolerate. This was quite unusual, but I guess the Blue-faces must have been either very hungry or they were sick of the other birds shit! It was quite interesting to see, and from what I saw none of the birds actually got injured in anyway.
The second thing I saw was a species of bird that I haven’t seen in a very long time, and that was the Galah! There were only two of them, and they were perched on the powerlines on the other side of the road, opposite my house. They were most likely a breeding pair due to them sitting close to each other and affectionately and gently grooming each other’s feathers. They made zero sound while they were there, so I’m glad I decided to just look up in search of interesting birds, because I wouldn’t have known they were there, otherwise! It’s nice to know that the Galahs are still hanging around, even if I don’t see them very often.
Text on right reads: "Galah with its crest on display a little"
Text on left reads: "There is a small patch of featherless skin around the eye, in the same colour as the pink face feathers"