What's their game? Cockatoos favour playing at the net

All of us who belong to a tennis club have a favourite court, and somehow one morning last week at Ainslie Tennis Club there were dozens of sulphur-crested cockatoos all over court two but totally ignoring three identical-looking courts. This columnist asked them what was going on, but they were, like Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, ignoring the press.

This was mysterious behaviour by the cockatoos, and coincidentally there had just been, nearby in Corroboree Park, discussion of some of the mysteries associated with the Gang-gang cockatoo. A cluster of us (including photographer David Flannery) had been attending the launch of the Gang-gang survey, a citizen-science-style endeavour already well under way and much-discussed here.

Our ignorance of Gang-gangs is profound, the Canberra Ornithologists Group's Chris Davey told us (above screeches of sulphur-crested cockatoos going to and from nearby court two).

Back to our ignorance in a moment but first, to deepen our already fathomless appreciation of Gang-gangs, naturalist Ian Fraser told us how cleverly they dine on the plump and (for us) repulsive sawfly larvae that congregate in twitching, writhing clumps.

The dexterity of a Gang-gang's beak and tongue when eating anything is amazing. Your columnist was lucky enough to see fine film of it in recent days. These birds somehow, at high speed, deftly, surgically, wheedle the tiniest of seeds out of big berries, discarding the berries' flesh.

Fraser told us eucalyptus leaves are ''fizzing with toxins'' and ''must be among the worst foods in the world'' and yet the sawfly larvae have evolved to find the nutrition in them while diverting the toxins to a dorsal gut sac in their bodies from which they regurgitate some of this gunge to repel predators.

''But Gang-gangs,'' Fraser told us with admiration, ''have learnt in turn to circumnavigate this defence and I've watched them very delicately removing and disposing of the gut sac, before munching on the larvae.''

Meanwhile, though, COG's Davey lamented, we don't even know if our city's faunal emblem ever breeds here. It turns out (blush) that most of COG's collected reports of city and suburban Gang-gangs' so-called ''breeding behaviour'' turn out to be at times of the year when Gang-gangs don't breed. So, when folk have interpreted a sighting of an adult Gang-gang inspecting a hole in a tree as a search for a nesting site when, really, it was either not nesting time (wherever they do nest) and it was just as likely the intelligent bird wasn't thinking about nest sites but was instead either looking for something edible or just showing an intelligent interest in nooks and crannies.

Some arachnophobic readers have not enjoyed our recent pictorial stories about huntsman spiders (US field biologist and world authority on these spiders, Linda Rayor, is in Canberra and we went spider-seeking with her) and have been quick, shuddering, to tell us so.

We promise them this will be the last picture and discussion of huntsman spiders for a very long time. But the spider Martin Miller saw and photographed in Chifley, posed on his back garden's shade sail, is too dashing to resist.

It makes one wonder if it would assist our appreciation of these spiders if they were part of the competition at the Canberra Show, like showing off our best chickens, dahlias, alpacas, guinea pigs and cats. Martin Miller's smashing huntsman would surely have had a good chance (in the best suburban huntsman class) of the first prize and best in show sashes and rosettes, impressing judges with its size and symmetry, its patterning, the health-displaying brightness of its eyes (all eight of them) and the lustre of its leg hairs.

We harped on the fact that Professor Rayor got bitten, twice, by a chunky huntsman while we were with her, and that her reaction showed that the huntsman's bite, as well as being rare, does no harm at all and is much more bland than a bee sting. But arachnophobic readers point out, reasonably, (this columnist suffered a life-spoiling phobia for many years, sensitising me to the plights of sufferers) that facts and reason are of no help with an intense phobia. When you are seriously phobic you believe that the object/activity that terrifies you can kill you. Having the brain of a Nobel laureate is of no help whatsoever.

And what amazing phobias some folk have! Doing a little Googling on this subject, we've come across the astonishing information in someone's blog, advising that, ''Composer Frederic-Francois Chopin shared a fear of being buried alive with author Hans Christian Andersen.''

Gasp! With which other unfortunate did poor Chopin share this elaborate fear? Was counselling of any use to them? Did Andersen know about their feelings? The closest we have come to a phobia like this is the horrible thought of being seated next to a Liberal MLA on a long flight.

Unless, of course, that sentence was not what the blogger, writing in these post-punctuation times, was trying to say.