Kookaburra - feathered laugher

I've always liked Kookaburras. What Australian doesn't?

I think I remember reading about them in David Fleay's book on Australian animals when I was a child and definitely loved reading research about their communal nature and things like why they trapeze fly.

It's not surprising that one of the stories in my storytelling repertoire is one I created with prep students about a kookaburra and a rather 'muddle headed' but heroic wombat.

We used to have kookaburras visit us at home. They would sit on the clothes line under the mango tree and laugh and look for worms and bugs in the compost. There are too many construction sites around us now and although we still hear the occaisional one in the distance they don't come visiting like the butcher birds, magpies and rainbow lokikeets.

Still they always sound like home.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

And here's the poem that inspired that video on bubbl.us - you can move it around and zoom to see it.