Galah o'clock

Who needs an alarm clock?  Not us.  (Turn your volume up as high as it will go and you'll still only get a smidgen of the true effect.)

Instead we have this charming young visitor at 4.30am most mornings.  What we used to call the "rusty bedsprings bird" is actually a young galah. The only way it shuts up is if one of its parents pokes something down its cakehole.  Have to say, that particular specimen isn't our favourite garden visitor.

Small, sanity-saving tip

Wee tip here.  If you go to the excellent Peel Zoo and go inside the huge aviary, just make sure you are not wearing your favourite Starfish woollen jacket with the shiny, silver-lined hood.  Because a Galah will fly up and land in it and start, well, generally acting like a Galah.

Then another one will arrive.

Then another one.

One will wait on your head and two more on your shoulders for their turns in the hood.

Then they'll all have a go at each other and squawk and flap and scratch while they rearrange their positions in the hood/head/shoulders pecking order.

 
With all that pink and grey flapping around you you will look like you are in a 1980's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds".  Only your children will be laughing at you.  Well, until they find themselves fending off an overly amorous Black Cockatoo.

Those aren't the mad zoo Galahs the pictures; these ones are the very well-behaved bunch who act like Galahs as they peck around on our front lawn most mornings.

And that picture at the top of this post is of a real, limited-edition Barbie doll which is sadly now all sold out.  Mad, but good-mad, not bad-mad I reckon.