I went to the Dunedin Botanic Gardens looking for the azaleas but ended up getting sidetracked at the aviary.  

I’m pretty sure this guy is an Australian King Parrot – he posed so beautifully for me. 

He was very high energy and kept on flitting across the cage with his buddy.

Meet Sid, a cockatoo who says “Hello!” and gargles “How are you?” in the most adorable Kiwi accent. When he first spoke to me, I was so confused – there were no people around me at all!

I thought this bird was crazed but apparently this is how corellas look. He was trying to eat the log he was sitting on – he could fit most of it in his beak!

These cuddlebugs are eclectus parrots, also from Australia – they’re the same species, believe it or not! The male is green and the female is red.  That’s an extreme case of sexual dimorphism (males and females looking different from each other.)

This cool cat is a red-tailed black cockatoo – the red is on the underside of her tail. (You can tell it’s a her by the freckles! Males don’t have them.)  Also from Australia!

This is a female red-winged parrot (the males have a patch of blue on their back.)  She sat and preened in front of me and it was just amazingly gorgeous to watch. I love the definition in her feathers.

And this is a male! He’s much brighter in color, with bigger red spots and a (hidden) blue spot that I’m going to try to get a shot of next time I go.

Finally, my favorite shot – it looks like such a sibling moment, doesn’t it? (For some reasons, birds really remind me of my brothers!) I just feel like Right Bird is just waiting for Left Bird to start saying, “Not touching you! Not touching you!”  (To be fair, in my family I’d be much more likely to be Left Bird than any of my brothers.) 

I can’t believe how much fun I had at the aviary – all the birds were active and it was a lot of fun to watch and talk to them!