Such perspectives from elsewhere in the Wide Brown are usually interesting Con. What interests me also is the choice of sound-words from the inadequate store we have to convey what we hear in the natural world. I note the ‘baying’ below. My Macquarie gives ‘bay’ as ‘a deep prolonged bark, as of a hound or hounds in hunting’. Perhaps your correspondent meant that, or perhaps he/she meant ‘bray’: ‘a harsh breathy cry, as of the donkey’. Either way, I find it interesting that your correspondent calls into service a word that acquired much of its meaning in relation to hounds or donkeys to describe the sound of channel-bill chicks. Perhaps the aborigines would have used something like ‘awhharkagl’, being a word coined for the purpose, just as they used something like ‘kookaburra’ or ‘kurrawong’ for a different local purpose.
From: Con Boekel [
Sent: Sunday, 21 October 2012 11:09 AM
To: COG list
Subject: [canberrabirds] Koel and Channel-billed Cuckoo (but where?)
Hi everyone
I gleaned these two posts from one of the political blogs I follow. I thought you might be interested in non-birdo views of Koels and Channel-billed Cuckoos. I don't know where the posters live, or who they are.
Con
OzPol Tragic
'Good Morning, Bludgers.
3 drenching summers, and I’d forgotten about “storm birds” (koels); nature’s sound-proofing & ear-plug piercing, continuous (from pre-dawn onwards) Weapons of Mass Human Sleep Destruction. 3.30 start this morning; still going at 5.45!'
Bushfire Bill
'Looks like the bloody channel-billed cuckoos are back and looking for the Currawong family’s nest.
That means no currawong chicks (they die of starvation) for the second year in a row and currawong parents exhausted by the end of summer.
Incessant baying of cuckoo chicks being raised by currawong foster parents half their size nearly drives me crazy. Starts 5.30am, continues to 8.30pm, non-stop right outside my office window (seemingly, at least).
At the end of all this parasitism, the cuckoo parents come back, rested, and scoop the (by now) fully grown foster children up for a flight back north.
Currawong parents nearly dead from feeding the invaders.'
