Birds are pecking apart Australia's national broadband network Australia's national broadband network (NBN) is being pecked apart by birds. nbn™, the company building and operating the NBN, has revealed that “native parrots have recently been found feasting on spare power and fibre cables strung from NBN Co's near 2,000 Fixed-Wireless towers”. The company has used a picture of a sulphur- …
Culling doesn't work - what will work is a good recipe ... cockatoo cutlets, curried cockatoo, blackened cockatoo or similar ... humans get bored shooting and killing things eventually but they never get tired of a good meal.
Here in Louisiana we used to throw Red Drum back when we caught them as a trash fish ... and then Paul Prudhomme invented Blackened Redfish ... Red Drum is now on the endangered list...
Wot? And no one's tried popping a few on the Barbie?
They sound like every other species of flying rodent, and I'm quite an admirer of the Korean rural rodent control policy
But oh dear what a glorious headline opportunity sadly squandered.
"Flying rodent tells NBN to flock off."
"Flock that. Cockatoos couldn't give a XXXX how much NBN cost"
eating our local birds ? John, there is a local saying about that. To cook a parrot, drop a rock and parrot into a pot of water. Boil until rock is soft, eat it and throw bird away. In the NT the local story was wrapping cockatoo in foil or mud and baking in hot coals for two hours would do. Never tried it as barra were available.
Oz wildlife, deadly and tough in both sense of the word. PS first brown snake of summer around yesterday. Regrettably, much of our local wild bird populations are reducing, except sulfur crested cokatoos. Many juvenile magpies are hit by 4WDs at speed on narrow lanes locally.
You haven't heard about the recipe for cockatoo soup.
Take one cockatoo, plucked or not. Toss in pot of boiling water, a little salt added. Toss in one house brick. Boil for a few days. When brick is dissolved, chuck out cockatoo and eat the soup.
That's how tough the buggers are.
Passenger pigeons made the mistake, other than being delicious, of migrating south for the winter in large, low flying flocks. So low flying they were netted.
Cockatoos do not migrate en mass making an eradication program in a country with such large wildernesses a very different proposition.
Being native is not a necessary bar to culling or hunting, see the roo meat in the supermarkets. In NZ the once fairly uncommon native paradise shellduck has adapted to open farmland and farm ponds so well (they eat grass too) that it is as legal to hunt them, in the season, as introduced mallards.
But better bone up on your NZ native duck profiles before you go. Shoot one of the rare native ducks you are not allowed to shoot and all hell will descend around you.
Cricket is the answer, as so often. Was reading a thing about WG Grace on one of his tours of Australia in the 1880s/90s. Apparently the England team were travelling for some inordinately long distance, and as WG put, amused themselves by having a competition to see how many of the local parrots each one of them could shoot from the moving coach.
Good old WG. The man who wrote on the first page of his manual on batting, "one should always remove one's pipe before going out to bat". Execllent advice, I'm sure we can all agree.
... failed to heed the lessons learned by every other telco & regional/remote broadcaster in the last 50 years?
I wonder how much of their in-ground fibre is termite & wombat proof?
(Reminds me of the scene a few years ago when they were relining street pipes around here (gas, I think). To measure it they rolled the sleeving out in sections along the right of way behind the houses houses, backing on to the local park, then knocked off for the afternoon. When they came back next morning, they found it shredded & hanging in chunks from the trees.
Turns out the local possums & scrub turkeys loved the stuff...)
Plus ca change. In the early days of the Overland Telegraph to Darwin (~1870), they kept getting line breaks because the local Aboriginal people found that the ceramic insulators made excellent sharp edges when broken, so climbed the poles and made off with them. Chief Engineer Charles Todd (the town of Alice is named after his wife) deflected this by ordering old broken insulators be left scattered around the poles after construction and maintenance.
Hey, this is a good idea... .we can deal with all sorts of varmits in the same stroke....
..... whilst the idiot trophy hunters are out taking pot-shots, the other crowd of parakeets will be busy shredding the camper-van's tires, window seals, roof vent, the tents, food containers, eskies, water containers - in fact just about anything that can get their beak into.....
...... so we end up with lots of dead cockatoos and lots of dead trophy hunters... a win win I think!
The birds are well known to enjoy what they do and if the active cables are protected why bother putting in spares and not protecting them.
It has all happened before The SF BART system suffered from cables being destroyed by gophers so all the buried cables had to be dug up and replaced by the armoured ones which should have been used in the first place.
Being a dumb cheapskate costs money.
Or some contractor saw dollar signs. They told them that it would be cost savings knowing they would have4 to be dug up and relaid .
Reminds me of what happened here back in the noughties.
New highway project awarded to the lowest bidder, started falling apart as soon as it was opened.
Mo problem, call in the company contracted to do repairs.
Guess what? Same company.
So "tweeting" is right up there with "white christmas" as something those drongoes from the northern hemisphere think is a thing.
Some few birds are pleasant to listen to - so long as you can hear them over the flies. The game 'Gaints: Citizen Kabuto' used Australian wildlife calls as part of its background ambiance, supposedly to create the sense of an alien world... personally I found it comforting and familiar.
I used to share my house with a budgie. He could say "ploppy bottom" amongst other things. Saved me the bother. I often thought it would be fun to spend a couple of years down there teaching the native budgies a few choice phrases.
Mind you despite their diminutive size budgies can be quite loud if they want to be.
Most New Zealand birds tell you their name, their Maori name at least. The Maori listened to the birds, assumed they were telling them their names so obliged. And yes the Morepork (native owl) really does say 'morepork' in the night time bush. The keas, the mountain parrots who have destructive tendencies to match cockatoos will also go 'keeaaa'.
I remember trying to sleep in a tent at Franz Joseph with the woman now my wife while two keas in trees 40m apart screamed at each other. Then again I have also been woken in the men's dorm at Franz Joseph youth hostel by a chorus of korimako (bellbirds) which was glorious. The English name gives a sense of the tone of the call of these birds.
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