Jim Cottee saw and photographed this collared sparrowhawk butchering a crested pigeon that had been innocently feeding on berries (alas, the berries it has just consumed are very much in evidence in the picture) in a Lyneham garden.

We don't know why we're doing this grisly series but it may be that subconsciously we are trying to balance the way in which most bird pictures we publish here are of impossibly cute birds (looking like soft toys) that look as if they could never slay the things they eat. That distorts Nature, which is actually red in tooth and claw (or in this case beak and talon).

But, talking of cute birds that look like soft toys, this year's Gang-Gang Survey continues in the hope of our discovering much more about the species Callocephalon fimbriatum that, although it is our territory's faunal emblem and is loved by all who see and hear it, is a bird of mystery. We have known very little about where it is and where it isn't in the ACT and almost nothing about where (what districts) it makes its nests in holes in trees. Everyone has been asked to join in this survey being orchestrated by the Canberra Ornithologists Group, by contributing their sightings or non-sightings. For obvious reasons the Gang-Gang column is taking a feverish interest in this work.

Now COG has collated the findings thus far and we begin to get a sense of what parts of Canberra are Gang-gang-blessed and which are Gang-gangless. In a recent week-long intensive survey or ''muster'', observations were obtained from 52 suburbs, with 68 per cent of sites recording no Gang-gangs at all while some suburbs (notably Acton, O'Connor, Ainslie, Garran, Pearce and Deakin) reported sightings almost every day. The largest number of Gang-gangs reported on any one day was 34 in Deakin (life is unfair, for wealthy Deakin already has more than its fair share of everything), 29 in Pearce, 18 in Campbell and in Ainslie, and 16 in Hackett.

But what if, this columnist's inner ornithopsephologist wonders, an apparent almost total absence of Gang-gangs from remotest Belconnen and Tuggeranong and from Gungahlin is due in part to the battling young pioneers of these suburbs not being bird-conscious and not knowing or caring that there is a survey under way?

Meanwhile, if you love this city and whatever your social class and however boondocky your suburb, COG would like you to join in the citizen-science work of the survey. Go to COG's website (canberrabirds.org.au) to find out what to do.

Our semi-blasphemous column comments about Nick Kyrgios fever (and about how tedious his kind of elite men's tennis is with all the thunderbolt serves that never come back, strangling potentially entertaining rallies at birth) has moved Canberra poet Suzanne Edgar to contact us. She sends us this sonnet all about the very different world of (social) tennis as so many Canberrans know it. And of course social players bring their dogs (as pictured) to be ballboys.

WINTER SPORTS*

When early morning mists that clothe our lake

begin to lift and leave the shores quite free

the tennis players, only half awake,

trot out to start a game; but gingerly

for frosty grass can cause a sudden slip.

A patch of muddy clay could well betray

unwary folk who have a metal hip

and hope to play again another day.

At once the air is pinging with hit balls

while leaps and lunges heat the racing blood.

The shouted scores and jokes, triumphant calls,

disturb the peace of a sluggish neighbourhood

but hours of hit and miss, of raucous fun

subside with tea and scones in the lazy sun.

*Winter Sports is from her 2012 collection The Love Procession.

The team at the Yarralumla Residents Association is the Brazil of international NIMBYism. Whenever it turns out to play, it shows irresistible attacking flair in its resistance to any ghost of a scintilla of Yarralumla-touching change.

And now that it seems to have joined with the Argentina of NIMBYism, the Deakin Residents Association, in opposing the proposal of the release of land to house 4000 people at the former Canberra Brickworks site, that proposal has about as much chance of success as the plucky Faroe Islands (ranked 136 in the world) has of ever winning the World Cup.

And reports of the recent public meeting of these worthies reveals that in Deakin resident David Mackenzie the local NIMBYs have their own Lionel Messi, with Mr Mackenzie showing individualistic flair with his vision of what may happen if any actual outsiders move into the neighbourhood.

He said the development could become an urban ghetto since ''In London islands of high density development have become ghettos of crime and God knows what else''.

Whenever the Yarralumla Residents Association and its burgher cronies pipe up we wish there was an annual international award, rather like the Ig Nobel Awards given for inconsequential scientific research or like the Literary Review Bad Sex Award given for ludicrous writing about sex in fiction, for the year's most extravagant utterances made by NIMBYs. Of course Canberran NIMBYs, the world's most intense (for it is always the most comfortable and privileged First World NIMBYs that make the most noise) would win the award every year, perhaps necessitating a handicapping system that gave other cities' more shy and reasonable NIMBYs a chance of the award.