After New Zealand voted the kea its favourite bird, we asked Guardian readers which Australian bird they love most – and least. With more than 800 species to choose from, we tapped into a wide range of opinion on the subject.
One thing is obvious from the comment thread: there’s a lot of avian love out there, and some found it hard to choose a No 1. As our own First Dog on the Moon pointed out, “there are no bad birds”.
janusflytrap asked “why are you inciting birdism when they’re all amazing” and there was even this, from breitling1884:
Another example of the Guardian and its identity politics.
‘Impressive birds’
But notwithstanding the reservations about singling out winners, many were more than happy to reveal their preference, perennial favourites the sulfur-crested cockatoo and kookaburra featuring heavily.
MarrkyD chose “cockatoo, the punk bird”.
Alan Baird agreed, describing the cockatoo as “full of character and Australian as buggery”.
rastamau5 begged to differ:
Surely the best Australian bird has to be the cassowary.
Electric-blue, clawed, horned, and six feet tall, no one outside Australia actually believes the cassowary exists. It’s the drop bear of the avian world.
And it can disembowel a horse.
AndrewMcIntosh preferred lorikeets: “the tie-dye hippies of the skies”.
And Greyranga related fondly:
Have spent a totally engrossing couple of hours watching (through binoculars) a wedge tail-eagle cruising up and down a ridge line riding thermals and looking for prey.
He barely flapped his wings.
Impressive birds.
MsDWrites recalled:
The kookaburra I saw on the poshest street in Newtown, holding someone’s prized koi carp in his beak, whacking the already dead fish on the branch before guzzling it down bit by bit. ‘I’ve got this sorted,’ its expression said.
And the Guardian’s own Helen Davidson chose two:
The best bird is a Jabiru because they are enormous, majestic dinosaurs with evil Tolkienite faces, who build six-foot-wide nests.
The other best bird is the curlew, because it is ridiculous and bases its entire survival on standing motionless whenever it’s near a human, pretending to be a plant.
For mattwroberts, it’s the tawny frogmouth:
Swift, silent, nocturnal, fugly. Humble but bloody good at its job. Which includes looking like a bit of broken tree. And sounding like a distant bubble jet printer.
BobSantamaria’s take was brutally simple: “I love the powerful owl. It eats brushtail possums.”
While AshBerger let us in on his dream:
I have a fantasy of an alternate reality Australia where the galah is our national symbol and our flag is simply pink and grey.
‘Cane toads of the sky’
But of course we also asked readers to confer the wooden spoon. Which did they consider the worst Australian bird?
The Indian mynah, the brush turkey and the ibis all vied for the dubious distinction of being most hated bird:
ShaunDogga was unequivocal about the Indian import:
Without a doubt, the worst is the common mynah – the cane toads of the sky.
Daisy06 called mynahs “flying rats”.
Many readers pointed out that the pesky (to some) mynah is different from the noisy miner, which is a native, but that didn’t cut any ice with jeroenspeculaas, who took just as much exception to the native:
Yes, there are bad invaders, but our local rogue has the upper hand over even them. Shoot a noisy miner family out of a patch of woodland, and up to 16 other woodland bird species return to live there. This bully boy could outbully Trump, wings down.
A lot of readers dislike the long-legged ibis, particularly those that seem to have taken over in inner-city areas. Like many, MorvaHindrance has a nickname for the scavenger:
Bin chickens are evil. They pretend they are gentle and friendly, then they take your sandwich from your hand and smack you with a wing in case you consider fighting back.
(Others preferred “dump ducks” or “tip turkeys” to describe the ibis.)
‘Soaring above derision’
Despite the pockets of antipathy, if readers’ comments are anything to go by, Australian birds in general are very well-loved, and even the least preferred of the species such as the ibis have their defenders.
optimist7 lovingly describes “great flights of ibis on the wing soaring above derision”, and RJHanley asks:
Who cares if they like to clean up food scraps and such? Better them doing it than rats and pigeons, surely?
Is picking the worst bird then as difficult as picking the best? Perhaps it’s because, as Canadian RonaldOrenstein says:
Australia’s birds are second to none.
