Pretty polly oh my

As the sun rises and the aircraft curfew lifts, the soundtrack for Tupper mansions these airless and densely humid summer dawns has been a cacophony of shrill and penetrating bird calls. No delightfully hearty mocking cackle from the kookaburra or the beautiful song of the magpie for this inner city aviary, no siree, it's haven to the cooing vibrato of those dirty pigeons and the irritating chatter of the Indian mynah.

One morning as i lay twitching and sticky under my crumpled and twisted bedclothes, forlornly determining whose call was whose, my ears cocked upon hearing a new call that was intriguing in its dissatisfaction, half-heartedness and complete flatness, was it a bird or just Pauline Fowler risen and doing a spot of ghost hectoring.

I could not fathom what it could be. All i could picture was a Sid and Marty Kroft creation of a bird with a great long bugle for a beak or perhaps it was a Boogaloo, they are in the air and everywhere after all. I then thought of Sigmund and the Seamonsters and the actor who was in that and who had earlier played Jody in Family Affair, murmured "oh, Mr French" and rolled over to fall into slumber and dream of Uncle Brian Keith astride a dinosaur, with a beautiful array of kaleidoscopic reflections rotating in the dream's opening credits.

Back to the call of the wild.

The bird's call had me puzzled for a couple of weeks and i finally discovered its owner while I was walking along the street, ears at attention. On hearing the sound, for which i had developed a strange affection, I reacted as though some regressed memory had been triggered and my left shoulder had a spasm attack. I looked up into the bright blue sky and saw that the screech came from a sulphur-crested cockatoo flying above me.

I was surprised. This handsome specimen has really lost out big time in the quality of its call. I had assumed its call would be the same as the black cockatoo which you generally only see in the country. The black cockato is a magnificently handsome creature with a corresponding cry - foreboding, gutteral and powerful. The black cockatoo uttering this cry while swooping over the trees with its enormous black wings spread wide is an audiovisual spectacular.

Closest you'll get to seeing a winged monkey and the closest NSR will venture into reflections on the animal kingdom.