#kurrawong

This afternoon I spent the best part of 45 minutes trying to logically decide if you were a baby wattle bird, or a baby kookaburra {not knowing exactly what baby kookaburra's actually look like} - but really only coming up with the conclusion that you were a little, fluffy penguin. A Penguin that had been put up on one of the lowest but high branches, in my wattle tree. It was the only thing that made sense. You, were a penguin. Incredibly fluffy light charcoal chest and tummy, - zso, incredibly fluffy - fluffier than I've ever seen anything before! Honestly. Slightly darker incredibly fluffy little head and back. Darling little face. Your beak was not thin enough to be a wattle bird, it was wider, like a kookaburra's, but your head and face were the wrong shape for a kookaburra. 

And you had the most darling, tiny wingspan when you stretched out your tiny wings for what looked like the first time. St-ttr-etch! 

You were excellent at hopping from branch to branch and eventually up to what I can now recognise as your nest, that you'd just hopped out of. 

You waited and groomed yourself for a very long time and the places you'd put your beak then dented in in little darker shadows in your fluff. 

You are a fluff ball. 

And then you flew! With your tiny little stretched out wings. A very short distance up to the lowest branch of the gum tree. So light, so quick. So fluffy. 

I have only ever seen one other Currawong in person, which I'm guessing is your mum. A few months ago she appeared, and was very friendly, but incredibly big and a little intimidating when she would suddenly fly and swoop through the pathways below the canopies in my back yard, trying to shake off the two miner birds that constantly dogged her tail. 

I know Currawongs have dark backs, with a tiny dipping of white on the tips of their tail feathers, and on the tips of their wings, which is how you were finally identified. But you will also always be a penguin to me. The fluffy penguin that defied logic, that just appeared, this afternoon, in the wattle tree, out from a nest I didn't know you were even in - that I had genuinely begun to think was a penguin, from Phillip Island, that someone had , for some reason, brought back and placed on a tree branch in my garden. There was no other logical or conceivable conclusion. Either that  or your'e the missing link in evolution - from penguins to flying birds. A penguin that can fly! With tiny little darling wingspan wings! 

It's so very nice to meet you. Thank you for saying hello. And for coming to live here. Please, may you, your parents, and all of your family, friends and future generations come and live with me. You are the first darling little baby I have ever met , and the second Currawong - ever! It's so very nice to have you here. 

Along with the Rosellas, the teeny tiny honeyeaters, the little fluffy blue wrens, the wattlebirds, that one blackbird that lives here, all the cockatoos, the family of Kookaburra's, the few king parrots, the black cockatoos that sometimes stop by, the magpies, the possums - which you are actually direct neighbours with nest wise, so I'm sure you've already met - you will fit right in. 

I love you already.