This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel in North America, where it is summertime.

Jeremy Zackis of New South Wales is in the southern hemisphere, where it is middling cold for Australia, cold for Australia.

And remembering that Australia, it never occurred to me as a bird population that cannot migrate. Because where do you go? Antarctica?

I don't think so. There is no Florida to go to. I guess some of the birds head to the tropics because they live in the north. But the birds of New South Wales and Southern Australia and Victoria and even Perth, there's nowhere to go.

It's a continent.

So they winter in New South Wales and Jeremy's 11-year-old, very generous, Spoodle, adopts them.

How are they doing, Jeremy, are the families holding together?

They are certainly holding together.

And in fact, they developed, I guess you could say, a new pastime.

And now this isn't, this is kind of behavior I've seen them do before.

But I think for whatever reason this weekend, something was just in the water.

And this behavior became quite noticeable.

And what it was, John, is basically they tend to become stalkers. So when I say stalkers, what I mean is they're actually stalking me. So on Saturday, I was out in our backyard, just raking the leaves because we are in the dead of winter right now and it's quite messy out there. And I had Dallas out with me as he normally is. It's beautiful. It's cold, but the sun's out,

so it's getting warm. And it kind of felt like I had a set of extra eyes watching me the whole time.

So I'm there raking. And lo and behold, I turn around. And not only do I have Dallas just sitting

behind me in the warm sun on the grass, I also had the whole family of three magpies basically sitting

along the fence line watching me too. And I didn't think much of it. So I just kept going. I was

curious to see if that'd stick around, to be honest, go for about another three or four minutes.

I turn around. Not only do I have Dallas, the three magpies on the fence, but lo and behold,

in the distance, then I have three

Karawongs as well, also playing on my daughter's play equipment, effectively just seen there

and watching. And I decided to see it, to see how long this would go. So I continue working

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