BUDGIE BRILLIANCE
HE DESERT IS quiet for now, except for the sounds of our boots crunching over dry grass and padding across thick red dust as we approach a water-hole outside Alice Springs that only locals know about. It’s a cold early August morning and we’ve ventured here to see one of Central Australia’s most spectacular phenomena: a murmuration – an immense flock – of budgerigars. We settle by the water’s edge in the pre-dawn stillness and wait in silence for the birds’ first trills to emanate from somewhere unseen. Soon 20 budgies fly overhead, followed by group upon group swelling the flock. Their wingbeats pound as they sweep overhead, now in bands of hundreds, and their
