Who’s a cheeky little bird then?
POKE ABOUT IN many a memory, and bingo, there’s often a budgie. In Mark Carter’s case it’s Bluey, an’80s childhood pet last sighted in a gnarled old pear tree on the banks of the Annick Water in Ayrshire, south-west Scotland. “My mother hated seeing him in a cage so would let him out to fly around the house. But one day she left the window open and off he flew,” Mark recalls. “He hung around for a few days, and after school my dad and I would go sit under the tree trying to tempt him down, but he wasn’t interested. Then one day he was no longer there.”
Fast forward three decades and Mark is now a zoologist specialising in outback ecology, living and working in wild budgerigar heartland. As guide manager at the Alice Springs Desert Park, Mark has experienced many wonders, but rates none so highly as a budgie murmuration. “People talk about things that are quintessentially Australian or really big signifiers of the land, and for me those big budgie events are the peak of life in the outback,” he says. “They always result from a boom season–where there has been plenty of rain and resources, the right pattern of wet and dry to boost the numbers. So when that happens it’s almost like
