Sunday 29 April 2007

Gang-gangs

My first blog. I've been reading others, lurking on the edges of the lives of other people, looking for bloggers with interests that resemble mine. Now it's time to start my own.

The campus is looking very fresh this morning. After the long dry a rainy weekend has washed the dust off the leaves of the eucalypts, grevilleas and banksias.

Gang-gang Cockatoos are growling as they fly from one flowering tree to another, creating a tremendous amount of debris as they go. They pluck a whole cluster of blossom, hold it in their left foot while they eat and then drop the lot - it seems wasteful.

But I've been pondering on whether the trees actually benefit. In my gardening books I'm advised that most Australian native plants benefit from a good prune, especially a tip-prune when the plants are young. Well, this is exactly what the Gang-gangs are doing to the mature eucalypts. So maybe the smaller honeyeaters pollinate and Gang-gangs prune.