Philip - What you have overlooked is that ‘meat’ means (with a slight stretch) ‘meat’, specifically balls of sausage mince as displayed by the kookaburra in the foreground. With two exceptions, the categorisation is based on years of observed meat-eating and non-meat-eating by the listed birds. The exceptions to the rigorous empiricism of this study concern the eagle and the swan, the relevant preferences of which are based on observations further afield. ‘Unusual’ in relation to the eagle and the swan does not mean that it is unusual for them to eat or not eat meat but that it is unusual to find either of them in a back yard. I shall attend to this ambiguity before the poster is submitted for use in ACT schools. gd
From: Philip Veerman [
Sent: Thursday, 31 March 2011 8:10 PM
To: 'Geoffrey Dabb';
Subject: Handy back-yard bird-feeding guide
There must be a trick in this that I have fallen in..........
Sorry it is strange for you to be wrong but at least some of your birds that don't eat meat certainly do. Gang-gang Cockatoos often eat saw fly larvae. Other cockatoos eat wood boring grubs, domestic pigeons regularly eat chicken, admittedly not in a predatory way but you only need to watch them scavenging around the city near the people dropping fried chicken scraps. I'd be surprised if peafowl wouldn't eat little animals or bits of meat that was available to them.
I wonder about the "unusual" for the eagle.
-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffrey Dabb [
Sent: Thursday, 31 March 2011 12:14 PM
To:
Subject: [canberrabirds] Handy back-yard bird-feeding guide
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