a very special visitor

Today we had a visit from an Australian native bird, a kookaburra. He (actually we don't know if it's a male) has been sitting on the fence for a few days, apparently waiting for us to feed him (look at that beak, he's a carnivore). Today he flew right up on to the balcony rail and stayed there for about twenty minutes -- long enough for me to phone DD and have the boys meet our visitor through the magic of the Internet.

You can see he wasn't at all fussed about how close we got to him either!

Kookaburras are related to kingfishers. We didn't have any meat in the house but we did have some raw/green prawns (shrimp). He didn't seem to like it much but eventually ate about half a prawn -- I hope it doesn't upset his digestion too much. Perhaps he will visit us again -- we'd better see if we can find some more curl grubs in our daily gardening sessions; what better use for these root eating pests than to feed them to a beautiful native?