The Birds

Now, some people may not know that I have had previous experiences with vicious birds. When I was in Oxford, I was sitting on the window ledge on the second floor (looking at a sunset, actually) and a pigeon flew straight at me and nearly made me fall two floors down onto some concrete steps.

Well, I got up early to go down to the Opera House with hopes of securing a standing room ticket for tonight’s opening night of “Aida.” (I got lost in the subway system.) When I got there at 7:30, I expected a line of people to already have started forming. But there was no one in sight. So I decided to walk down on a little pier while I was on the phone with my mom. That is when it happened. One of those “Mine! Mine! Mine!” birds from Finding Nemo decided that I was in his territory. It flew straight at me, squawking or shrieking or making whatever sound you want to call it. I ducked, now yelling into the phone that a bird was attacking me. THEN IT CAME BACK FOR MORE! It flew straight at me again. This time we made eye contact and he meant business.
I got off the pier. The only consolation was that no one was around to see it because I had over estimated the zealousness of Sydney Opera viewers.

But the story continued again today when I got to the zoo. There was a rather large section of the zoo dedicated to farm animals. I felt like it was my job to walk around that part of the zoo with a superior attitude (seeing as I once raised pigs). So I was confidently and smugly striding towards the exit of that area. That is when the emu showed up. It walked straight at me. Again, eye contact. Then it GROWLED. An emu growled at me. I found another exit to that area and decided to stick to the more exotic animals. (There was a less dramatic incident with a parakeet in an aviary, too.)

So I am taking this opportunity to officially apologize to all birds. I do not know what I have done to offend your kind, but apparently there is some sort of bird contract out for my life. Please leave me alone.

The rest of the zoo was very, very cool. It turns out that the koala experience thing was basically $20 to get a picture of you near a koala. Lame. But I did get to see the koalas very close. It was a really well designed zoo. It was very easy to see all the animals and you were able to get very close to most of them. In the platypus pool aviary (where the parakeet attacked me) there was also a wallaby just wandering around. Lions, sea lions, a pygmy hippo—this zoo had it all. I enjoyed the Australian animals (no one else seemed very interested. I guess they are used to them. They were swarming around the farm animals, though.) It was too cold today for the two-day-old elephant to come out, though. I walked around for about six hours and I never got bored or ran out of things to see. (I did double back to look at the kangaroos and koalas again, though.)

Pictures on Facebook soon, I hope. All I need is to find a reliable Internet connection.