The other day I found myself on a set from The Birds at the Richmond Farm. Or that’s what it felt like. It’s the pecan trees, they attract an incredible amount of animal life – birds being my favourite visitors, rats my least fav. I do my best to ignore the rats but the birds are unmissable and unignorable (if that’s not a word, it should be).
We get ravens, magpie-larks, common mynas, lots of birds I can’t yet identify and, in large flocks, cockatoos and corellas. They swoop and screech and carry nuts with them and rip shells open and generally run amuck. I wonder if Alfred visited a pecan orchard before filming started.
Cockatoos and Corellas in the Pecan Trees
And, there they go, en masse, evoking the primal fear of a really scary movie, this time set in my front yard. All I needed was someone to yell *boo* for the effect to be complete 🙂
The truth is, this is a daily event, multiple times a day, so it’s not scary in the least. Who could be scared by a flock of birds anyway? Oh yeah, anyone who’s seen Alfred Hitchcock’s creepy classic 😮
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 
Oh I never watch scary movies, but I get the idea. I guess it is not as quiet on the farm as I imagined it to be.
At night the fruit bats squeak in the trees, by day the cockatoos screech overhead. Then there’s the bell birds, the whip birds, the ravens and …. no, not quiet.
Of course the major road puts paid to any peace and tranquility birds or no. Funny how a squawking animal is never as obnoxious sounding as a motorcycle no matter the relative volumes.