Quick trip to Canberra

The capital of Australia is Canberra, which is a small city between Sydney and Melbourne. Both Sydney and Melbourne have populations over 4 million. Canberra has only about 350 thousand. I was invited to give a talk at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra at the beginning of the week, so I spent two days there, without the family.

Because it was just a quick trip, I didn't do much touring. I did walk from the university up a hill to the botanic gardens, and around a bit. The gardens seem quite lovely. Next time I visit I'll be sure to spend a little more time.

Walking back down, I took the following picture of the city.

Lovely view.

Besides that trip up the hill, I stayed on the ANU campus.

But I still took a lot of pictures, because it turns out that there are lots and lots of beautiful Australian birds that live at ANU in Canberra.

In the morning, I woke up to the loud squawking of cockatoos. When I stepped out on the balcony just before heading out for the day, I found that over a dozen large sulphur-crested cockatoos had perched on the tree just outside my window. These birds are larger than sea gulls, very bright white, with pale yellow on the crest of their heads and under their wings. Some people keep them as pets, but that seems very sad, because they are extremely intelligent, extremely social birds. They live as long as humans, and they mate for life, and they live in large communities.

Gorgeous gorgeous birds. I wish I had had a camera to do them justice.

So after watching cockatoos for a while, I headed out the front door toward the other side of campus. Not a block away, I looked across the street and saw four very large green birds. At first I thought they were lorikeets, like we see all the time in Melbourne, until I realized how large they were. King parrots.

I continued walking, only to be distracted one block further by bright pink, white, and gray birds. A pair of brightly colored galah cockatoos were eating grass seed in front of one of the university buildings. I tried to take a picture.

But really I just scared them away.

So I continued walking. Up the street, turn the corner, and there was a whole tree full of king parrots! Bright red and green birds. These do live outside of Melbourne, along the Great Ocean Road, for example, but I had never seen an entire tree full of the birds all at the same time. That was too amazing not to stop, so I stood there, in a parking lot, shooting pictures with my sad phone camera of the king parrots.

All those lovely birds that you cannot see in my pictures are bright red and green king parrots.

If I'm going to continue to be excited about brightly colored birds in the wild, I may have to invest in a real camera.

I finally pulled myself away from the king parrots, and continued walking. As I walked, I would hear the occasional squawk of a cockatoo, and a large white bird would swoop by. I also spotted other Australian birds, like Australian magpies and noisy miners. And then as I turned off the road onto a path toward my building, I saw a pair of crimson rosellas.

Bright red and blue parrots, just poking in the grass. Life is good when you live in Canberra and you are a parrot.

All of this I saw in the 10 minute walk (now about 25 minutes) between my room on campus and the building where I would be giving the talk. Amazing! There are beautiful birds in Melbourne as well, but not all in the same place! At the same time! These Canberrans are lucky people.

In any case, the talk went fine. It was lovely to see a few people I had seen before.

I am definitely going to return to Canberra soon!