I'm John Bachelor with my good colleague Jeremy Zuckus in New South Wales.

Jeremy and I report on the Australian continent, the weather, the reptiles, always the reptiles,

and of course John's still learning cricket.

The discovery over these last years is that Dallas

wanted to get in on the action. Dallas is a spoodle. Jeremy walks him very

early in the morning. He then feeds him outside, and Dallas has decided to gather

together a retinue of birds. At first we thought it was just magpives who are dangerous especially in the spring

breeding season right now they will attack anything near their nests and then he

attracted the envy of the crows who sit on the fence and watch the magpies get treated special.

Now we have a new exotic bird that I'm learning from Jeremy for the first time is called

a curawang. It's native to Australia, so I'm not

embarrassed by never seeing it before. Jeremy, what is a Currawang and I

understand Dallas has collected a cura-long.

Well, a cura-ong is basically if you imagine a crow, it's kind of about the size of a crow,

but it has, I guess you could say, more softer features, so it does have a beak but the beaks a little bit shorter has a little bit of white around its eyes and I guess the most distinguishing feature of a car along is on the very tip of a

earth's tail it has a white lining so it's

actually quite a very distinctive looking bird and and it does have slightly shorter

legs than the magpie so it actually looks like a more gentile bird but it's a very

very friendly creature and unlike I guess you could say the crows which seem to be

very aggressive and boisterous that the carowong is actually quite a gentle soul and I've got to say John I'd never really seen them around here until this week and it all started when one day I was just I just brought Dallas back in from his walk and I was putting his lead away and putting away all the bits and pieces and I look outside and sitting on my barbecue basically at eye level there's this car along eyeballing me through the window and now I've learned basically from the

magpie experience and the crow experience whenever there's a bird eyeballing me

standing on my barbecue looking through my kitchen window I'm pretty certain that's

...