The Green Centre bis: cage and aviary birds

When I was young I kept budgerigars: I got my first one - a blue female called 'Penny' (who was shortly after joined by a green male called 'Oddy') - for my eighth birthday. They lived in a small cage indoors, but for my ninth birthday I got about a dozen budgies and a second-hand outdoor aviary. Each summer I put up nestboxes in the aviary, and the birds produced a few broods of chicks. At that time there was a weekly newspaper for people who kept birds: Cage and Aviary Birds, and I had a regular order with the newsagent, and read it avidly when it was delivered with the other newspapers, chiefly making plans (that rarely came to fruition) to acquire all manner of other birds.

So the sounds of budgerigars are familar to me and stand out from the rest of the acoustic landscape. From the first day out of Alice when I stopped to take a photo at a floodway, wherever there is water - be it Palm Valley or the waterholes around Uluru - there is the familiar chirping and choking song. The thing that tickles me most is that, part from the fact they are all the same colour and that they are not captive, they are just like the birds that I kept: the same song, but also the same behaviour - pairs propsecting for nest holes, and squabbling with others, or guarding their nest holes against intruders. This pair (the female's the one on the left with the brown, rather than blue, cere (the horny patch across the top of the beak)) were outside their nest, which, if it had been on the south, rather than the north, side would have been in the shadow of Uluru (that pinky brown background is Uluru's flank). I think that the female must already have eggs as you can see the 'parting' in her belly feathers from where she's been incubating:

Budgerigars weren't the only 'cage and aviary birds' that I saw in the Green Centre. In several places I saw zebra finches, and, although I never saw any nests, I saw them collecting nesting material on several occasions so they, too, were busy breeding:

It's no coincidence that the birds that I saw nesting in the Green Centre are common 'cage and aviary birds'. Both budgerigars and zebra finches are ecologically adapted to breedng in near-desert conditions. Both of them are seed-eaters, and rather than being tied to breeding at a particular time of year, breed in reponse to favourable conditions - rainfall that produces a flush of seeding grasses. Their seed diet and willingness to breed at any time of year are what makes them easy to keep - and breed - in captivity.