Before moving to Australia, I visited the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. I marvelled at the captive rainbow lorikeets, thrilled that I would soon be seeing them in the wild. When I arrived in Canberra, I shared my neighborhood with many colorful, interesting birds, but no rainbow lorikeets. Only when traveling to Sydney, Queensland, or South Australia did I spot them. Then, a few days ago, I saw three rainbow lorikeets in my community. Over the last 18 months, my feelings about these birds have changed. I looked at them now with something approaching dread.

The natural range of rainbow lorikeets is broad, including the northern coasts of Australia, parts of eastern Australia and South Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Timor-Leste, and Indonesia. They have been introduced to Perth, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, and a few vagrants have found their way to Tasmania.

As cities and suburbs grow, bird populations have winners and losers. Some birds struggle with habitat loss, while others adapt readily to urban development and a year-round food supply from suburban gardens. Rainbow lorikeets are one of the big winners. Loud, aggressive, and traveling together in large flocks, they compete for available food and nesting trees, driving out local birds. They are prodigious breeders, producing up to three broods a season. Efficient eaters, their tongues are like bristle brushes, well adapted to reach deep within native flowers to extract their preferred food: nectar and pollen. They also eat insects and seeds and they LOVE fruit. And therein lies a problem.

The rainbow lorikeet is a menace to fruit. In Perth’s suburbs in Western Australia, lorikeets feed on figs, pears, apricots, nectarines, loquats, mulberries, mangoes, passionfruit, cherries, apples, peaches, plums, and guavas. In commercial fruit-growing areas, they have decimated table grapes and a range of other fruits. The bird is considered either an agricultural pest or an unwanted organism in New Zealand, Western Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania.
 
New Zealand’s problems with lorikeets began in Auckland in the 1990s when a few dozen birds were deliberately (and illegally) released into the wild. Ten years later, the population had grown to 200 birds. They were successfully removed, mainly by live capture, by 2002.  
 
Tasmania is especially concerned by new sightings and the risk to its fruit-growing industry. Rainbow lorikeets also pose a threat to native Tasmanian parrots as they compete for food and resources. The birds carry Psittacine beak and feather disease, further threatening native parrots. The Tasmanian Government noted the cautionary example of Western Australia. Fewer than 10 rainbow lorikeets had been introduced in the 1960s. By 2006, the population was estimated to be as many as 20,000 birds. Seeking to avoid Western Australia’s fate, Tasmania is considering eradication measures to keep rainbow lorikeets from getting fully established.

What do rainbow lorikeets mean for Canberra?  The Canberra Ornithologists Group observed that the resident population of rainbow lorikeets is gradually spreading south. Reported sightings climbed to 7.6%, which is 17% higher than last year and three times the 30-year average. Naturalist Ian Fraser commented in an article that the numbers of rainbow lorikeets (along with another parrot, the little corella) are steadily increasing: "Most people don't notice it yet, they're still relatively restricted, but they're starting to breed in the nature reserves. They're going to be all over Canberra in the next couple of decades I think."

Birders have begun observing the pressure on local birds. The photo below shows a lorikeet driving away a pair of eastern rosellas from their nesting hollow.

The photo was posted to Canberra Nature Map, and a commenter expressed concern for rosellas and other local birds, considering the dramatic growth of the rainbow lorikeet population in recent years.

I imagine my neighbor’s small fruit orchard will suffer along with the local birds. And did I mention how noisy rainbow lorikeets are? While feeding flocks are generally fewer than 50 birds, they can contain more than 1,000. Here’s what a flock of 30 sounds like. Now imagine hundreds in a swarm.

Hard to believe these active, beautiful birds can cause so many problems. Orchard destroyers, disease carriers, threat to local birds, and noisy as well. This is one new bird that I'm not excited about welcoming to the neighborhood.

For nine days in March, Canberra holds an annual hot air balloon festival. Balloons come from all over Australia and around the world. They launch from the lawns of Old Parliament House and drift over the lake and city. What started as a one-time event in 1988 has grown to be one of the world’s biggest and longest-running hot air balloon festivals.

More than 30 balloons launch daily if conditions are right. The weather has to be calm, but not too calm, or the balloons won’t have enough lift to launch. Because the weather is often calmest early in the morning, we waited out in the cold, just before dawn, for the announcement. At 6:15am, the word came that, yes, they would fly.

The balloons are brought in by cars and trucks. The first step is to get the basket out and attach the burner system. Next, the balloon is attached to the basket and spread out on the ground. Thousands of square meters of material make up a balloon. It has to be big and strong enough to carry the pilots, any passengers, and the basket.

The crew uses a powerful fan to begin inflating the balloon. Once there’s enough air, the burner flame heats that air, building pressure.

The crew continues to heat the air until the balloon comes up off the ground. A balloon can stand about as tall as a five-story building, while the air inside can weigh up to 20 tons. Once the balloon is up, the crew gets on board. When everything is ready, the ground crew releases the balloon, and the pilot sends up a steady flame into the balloon to keep the air hot. Up it goes!

When my husband and I saw this advertisement in Adelaide, we realized immediately that we were not the target audience. We had no idea what a frog cake was, but we both pictured something like a crab cake, with little frog legs sticking out the sides.

As always, curiosity drove me to do some research. What I discovered was astonishing: the frog cake is a South Australia Heritage icon, listed by the National Trust of South Australia in 2001. Talk about missing a cultural reference!

Frog cake is served for dessert. It is a small cake shaped like a frog’s head, made from sponge cake, jam, and cream with a fondant covering. Balfours Bakery, an Adelaide institution, created the frog cake in 1922 when tea rooms were still very popular. The inspiration reportedly came when a member of the Balfour family visited a confectionary in France. Frog cakes were originally covered in green fondant, but brown and pink versions were introduced later.  

The frog cake is the Balfours Bakery mascot, and it has been used to promote both Adelaide and South Australia. While frog cakes traditionally have been sold only in South Australia, now they are sold in Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland as well. The recipes I’ve found all look too fiddly to me, so I hope those frogs will be reaching Canberra sometime soon.  

A recent post compared the government shutdown in the United States to Australia’s 1975 crisis over passing an appropriations bill. To resolve the crisis, the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, who served as Governor-General, sacked Australia’s prime minister and put in the opposition leader to pass a bill before the supply (appropriations money) ran out on 27 November. When Parliament sought a no-confidence vote for the new prime minister, Kerr dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Kerr’s actions have remained controversial all the way up to today, and I noted there was a pending court case to make his communications with the Queen public, to determine to what extent Queen Elizabeth II was involved with her Governor-General’s decisions. Buckingham Palace has always maintained she knew nothing at all.

A court recently found that the palace letters between Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II will remain off-limits to the public. The decision has outraged many Australians and prompted more discussion about becoming a republic versus remaining a constitutional monarchy. This article explains the case and the constitutional ramifications of the court’s decision.