Australian War Memorial & The Birds

A couple weeks after we got here we went to the Australian War Memorial. It is really pretty and is in the center of Canberra. If you look straight ahead, you can see the Parliament building. We took the boys here to let them run around and get their energy out at the end of the day. There were cockatoo's everywhere. You can see a pic of one on top of the Australian flag at the memorial in the collage above. I will also add that the birds here are psychotic! They don't have nice little cheeps and chirps. They have the most obnoxious noises... all of them do. Some of them sound like dying children. It creeped me out when we got here. I thought it was really cool that there were exotic cockatoos and parakeet looking birds (not sure what they really are) all over just flying around at first, but now I can't stand to hear them. I'm sorry if you are a bird lover... bless you if you are. ;)

Here are some YouTube videos of two of the most common noises you hear. Think of them going all at the same time with a group of them and that's what a peaceful summers morn sounds like.

Cockatoo: (the cockatoo is the loud, obnoxious noise that you hear at the beginning but can't see)


Raven:


We don't really have any Kookaburra's on this side of Australia that I know of. I believe they are more found in Western Australia.

As a side note, the Parliament building right now has a bunch of aboriginals camping out in front of it. I find it odd. They actually attacked Julia Guillard, the Prime Minister here on their Australian Day (Jan 26th), which is like our Independence Day. They burned the Australian flag that day and caused a big riot in front of the Parliament building. It was kind of crazy. There used to be a lot more people camping out there, but now just a few tents remain. Is it me, or if people were camping out in front of the White House to protest, wouldn't they have been forced to leave? Or do people do that?