November Project: Day 13

[calissa]

onewhitecrow wanted to know about galahs, so here are some shots. Apologies for the quality of the photos. The galahs are much more skittish than the cockatoos and won't yet allow me to photograph them without a pane of (very dirty) glass between us. The lighting was also not the greatest.

Galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla) are almost ubiquitous throughout Australia. Being a kind of cockatoo, they mate for life. Below is a photo of a mated pair.



The differences between male and female are very subtle and I didn't learn the trick until recently. Below is a photo of a female. If you look carefully, you can see she has red eyes (please also disregard the state of my outdoor furniture--a casualty of cultivating such friendships).



Males have black eyes.



I mentioned earlier that they are a kind of cockatoo and you can see below that they do have a crest--though a rather more modest one than my friend from yesterday.



Speaking of my friend from yesterday, he continues to grow bolder. He peered inside at me for a good half an hour while I waited for my sweetheart to finish grocery shopping and bring me some bird seed (we had run out). We even played peekaboo for a little while, him bobbing his head around to see past the furniture and catch my eye. When the birdseed finally arrived, the cockatoo then allowed me to get very close when I brought out the food. I held some birdseed out to him, flat on my palm, and he rebuked me by (gently) nipping my finger (it was, after all, a silly move on my part). It didn't hurt, but it startled me so much that I dropped the seed.

It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.