walking past a salsify-eating cockatoo

It's just great that Penny has recovered from her gastroenteritis and I can walk along without stressing about whether she's scouting for food. (She always is, but I'm hopeful she won't make herself sick.)

As we stepped onto a path today, I noticed a cockatoo in the distance. Penny didn't, because she was nose-down checking out for edibles. Or good smells.

We approached, and the bird flew up into a nearby tree, holding something in its beak, and then nibbled on the plant it was holding.

I wish my phone could take a better photo, but if you zoom it up a bit, I think you'll see that it wasn't a grass stem. It was something more substantial. Inquisitively, I looked around to see what the plant might be. And there was a clue...

And lots more clues, actually - clumps of stems bent down and snapped off, all along the edge of the path. Also, a clump that hadn't yet been attacked...

Salsify. How interesting. It's considered a weed in Australia, but recently I've discovered it is edible.

Once we moved further away, the cockatoo landed on the path again and, after considering the available plants, decided on a big grass seed head, which it took up onto the old tree to eat.

Penny and I headed home for our own breakfast, and I'm pleased to say that Penny is now eating her normal range of food, instead of being limited to a 'gastro' diet.

looking at yellow-tailed black cockatoos at Heidelberg

Dogs are terrific for taking us to new and interesting places. If we didn't have a dog, we wouldn't have  taken a walk along an ordinary-looking mud track in Heidelberg.

And if we hadn't gone there, we wouldn't have found ourselves alongside a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos.

They were noisy and busy, seemingly finding food - or something interesting, at least - under the bark of the little trees around us. It was wonderful to realise they didn't much care that we were there, and we could have stayed for hours watching them swoop and land and rip into the trees, but we did eventually tear ourselves away and continue the walk.

Let's ban the use of Diclofenac

I was reading the latest edition of Australian Birdlife and came across a reference to the danger of veterinary Diclofenac prescriptions - it's an anti-inflammatory and analgesic drug. The reason it's mentioned in the Birdlife magazine is that it's highly toxic to vultures.

I can imagine a scenario where a cow, having been medicated with Diclofenac, dies and its carcass attracts vultures, including the wonderful, beautiful lammergeier, the largest bird in the European Alps.

From what I've read online, I gather Diclofenac is not a usual drug for dogs in the USA. It is not approved for use in animals by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but it can be prescribed legally by vets as an 'extra-label' drug.

Here's an extract from a review of a book by Dr Tim Flannery, Here on Earth:

For many years, India’s White-rumped Vulture population was large and thriving, but from the late 1990s the number of vultures suddenly declined. So precipitous was the drop that 97% of the birds disappeared over 15 years. As they died out, the animals they once scavenged were left to rot. Cattle carcasses piled up, feral dogs increased in number and the spectre of a rabies epidemic grew. The Parsees, a religious group who place their dead on towers to be consumed by vultures, watched in horror as the bodies of loved ones accumulated and slowly decomposed.
In 2006, autopsies revealed the birds’ kidneys had been destroyed by Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug given to cattle and water buffalo. Completely inadvertently, humans had brought the vulture population to the edge of extinction. In the immensely ambitious Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Text Publishing, 352pp; $34.95), Tim Flannery describes the vultures and other case studies that follow this depressingly familiar plot: either through indifference or ignorance, by poisoning the environment, changing the climate or launching more straightforward hostilities, humanity has created one ecological disaster after another. Will the vultures survive? Veterinary Diclofenac was banned in India in 2006 and small groups of vultures returned. However, the drug is still sold illegally, so the birds still suffer. 

The article in Australian Birdlife has this warning:

If we believe that because there are no vultures in Australia this is someone else's problem, we need to think again - there is recent evidence that Diclofenac is toxic to aquila Eagles too.This group includes the iconic Wedge-tailed Eagle and what's more, Diclofenac is approved for veterinary use in Australia as both an anti-inflammatory for horses and available without prescription for human use. With safe and cheap alternatives to Diclofenac available - such as the anti-inflammatory Meloxicam - it is time to phase the drug out before similar consequences start occurring in our own country.

Given that aquila Eagles live all around the world, for instance the Golden Eagle, I think it's important that this drug be banned everywhere, not just in India.

it's very hot for dogs, humans and birds

It's hot. Hot all day and hot all night. Penny is feeling the heat.

We took the comfy pet futon off her bed and replaced it with a wet towel, but she's not convinced that's a good idea and has rejected it. I'll put the futon back on, tonight, because I see on the Snooza website they say it's cool in summer. Certainly Penny did sleep on it last night, and the temperature only dipped to about 28 degrees Celcius (83 Fahrenheit).

While she was flaked out in the best spot to receive the breeze from our evaporative cooling, I was out in the garden checking for fresh water in our array of bird bathing bowls.

As I was filling this final birdbath I heard a chattering...

...and saw two thirsty little birds sitting right beside me, not a metre away, with their beaks open, and realised they were my very favourite birds, pardalotes.

I knew pardolates pardalotes live around here, because I've heard their song from high up in the trees, but to see some down near the ground, right up close, was fantastic. I couldn't get a photo, because I didn't have a camera, and by the time I crept away and rushed into the house to get one, they were - of course - gone.

Here are some photos of these lovely birds.

grass parrots and a dog

We visited a new walking place today, at the end of Wills Street in Kew. I don't know what the little off-lead place is called, but it has terrific views over towards the city of Melbourne.

Penny wasn't too keen on saying hello to the other dogs. She is quite wary when we go to places where she doesn't usually walk (pretty often, actually). But she greeted them quietly and headed away from them.

The grass parrots, as usual, aren't worried when there are dogs around.

We headed out of the little off-lead area and found some nice paths to wander along. The highlight was seeing this pair of - presumably amorous - grass parrots seemingly checking out a nesting hollow in a dead tree.