Kaka acrobatics

On Tuesday last week, not long after I arrived home from work, I was distracted by the sound of squawking outside my window. This is not so unusual in my neighbourhood - I live up near the Wildlife Sanctuary so there are plenty of native birds flitting around. One particularly noisy set of local inhabitants are the kaka, who swoop around the valley, screeching as they flit from tree to tree, chasing each other and generally larking about. The noise was quite close by, and when I went out on the deck to see for myself I spotted one of the aforementioned native parrots was messing around on the telephone lines to the house next door, about 10 metres away.

I was initially worried, because at first it looked like the parrot had somehow gotten its claw stuck on the phone line. It was sliding up and down the line, leaning out and grabbing the adjacent phone line with its beak, and flipping under to hang downwards on one claw before fluttering back to a vertical position. After a while it became obvious that the kaka wasn't trapped - it was just messing about. It was playing circus high-wire, occasionally balancing with its claws on one wire and its beak on the other, doing loops whilst holding on with one claw, and dangling upside down and waving its tail-feathers around. It seemed to be having a grand old time.

See also:

Video: Bandits of the Beech Forest (Documentary, 1996)