And that’s exactly why I refer to them as the “noisy colourful birds”. In the summertime, they squabble in the flowering gum sprouting from the carpark, under my bedroom window (in inner city Sydney). But my faves are the cockies – cheeky buggers though they are, and prone to gnawing through concrete building ledges.

Here’s a couple of my mates-in-the-moment, come to call, while I was working from home yesterday: