if you are at the Woodland Park zoo, you should feed the birds

[eub]

It was very cool and totally worth the one dollar admission -- full of budgerigars and cockatiels and other colorful parrot-type things. Blue walls, and wedges of light -- fun to photograph. Budgies clinging in clusters to the mesh ceiling. They (the humans) gave you a popsicle stick with seeds glued on, to offer for a feeding perch. The cockatiels were at first standoffish, but once I coaxed one to hop onto the stick, it finished the seeds, and knew I must have more around, so stepped onto my hand, bit at my picnic-auth wristband, sidled up my arm. I moved the bird from my shoulder (which is set about with nibbly-looking ears) and to my head, and crouched down so a boy could feed it. Seeds in my hair.

People hooting gently the way the sign said the wild dogs would, and recording it to a camera's video mode.

Tapirs can make a noise like when you make a buzzy squeak with air coming out of the neck of a balloon.

Comments

[cheesepuppet.livejournal.com]

So cool! It makes me want a bird again.

Did I ever tell you about Ziggy, my budgie when I was a kid, who could play solitaire? She was a genius. At least as far as parakeets are concerned.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

The "other colorful parrot-type thing" is an Eastern Rosella (Eastern, as in east coast of Australia). They are reasonably common in Canberra, although the Crimson Rosellas tend to bully them a bit. I don't see them here in Brisbane, but we have Pale Rosellas instead. They're a bit shyer, and don't have any red.
We also have Rainbow Lorikeets here, and they are even brighter coloured than Eastern Rosellas, if you can imagine.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the i.d. Wow, those lorikeets are bright birds.

I see that "rosella" apparently also is:

Austral. and N.Z.
A sheep whose wool is beginning to fall off naturally, and which is therefore easy to shear.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard the sheep definition for rosella. I'd heard that the word is a corruption of "Rose Hill'er", i.e. something found at Rose Hill, which was one of the earliest more rural settlements of white people in Australia.