Modern youngsters are so much better-travelled, see so much more of the world, than their parents ever did and this will be especially true of the young common koel (Eudynamys scolopacea) that emerged from its nest on Christmas Eve.
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As its observer and photographer Geoffrey Dabb muses, it will eventually migrate to somewhere far to our north (probably Papua New Guinea) for winter, while the two naive red wattlebirds that built its nest and reared it as one of their own, in Griffith, won't go anywhere so exotic. For the koel, increasingly famous in Canberra as its numbers increase here and as its famous day and night call (usually a far-carrying ''Coo-ee'') either enchants Canberrans or drives them to drink, is a kind of cuckoo. It lays its eggs in the nests of other species.
Koels are very hard to see and so, for example, Dabb says this one, having just left the nest, is still in the same tree and is still being fed by the naive wattlebirds but is well hidden now, high up among the foliage. And so it's usual for Canberrans to never see the author of the call.
And the call can agitate some of us (especially in Canberra where we have a quietness fetish, as if we don't all have an abundance of it waiting for us in the grave). It is very penetrating and can be relentless, by night as well as day.
But more and more Canberrans are being delighted by the koels or are going to have to adjust to them as the case may be (for example, my heritage-listed friend and I love being serenaded by one on Sundays as we play our breakfast-time tennis at the heritage-listed Reid Tennis Club).
The species seems to be warming to our city. As recently as 10 years ago, koels were very rare. Now there is a sprinkling of them.
Dabb's theory is that the species has discovered our parks and gardens' fruit-bearing trees and this may help ''suck them down'' from the more northerly and coastal-easterly places of yore.
Another idea, one of several elegantly discussed by koel-watching John van Tiggelen in an essay in last weekend's Good Weekend, is that the koel's increasing spread (it is even occurring as far south as Bendigo and some Melbourne suburbs) may be a fruit of climate change.
''The late 1990s, when koels began migrating further south in spring, saw a spike of hot years. Since then the years have stayed hot … and the records keep falling. In October, as koels winged their way south and fires raged in NSW, daily maximum temperatures remained more than two degrees above average, and 2013 is shaping up as Australia's hottest calendar year to date,'' van Tiggelen wrote.
Meanwhile it emerges that there is some PhD research being done here in Canberra into, among other things, which species are the most ''naive'' and unsuspecting when they find alien eggs (like those of the koel) in their nests. An interim finding appears to be that when researchers pop alien eggs into Canberra nests favoured by koels, the red wattlebird - the species that hatched and reared the Griffith koel - are the most gullible, the species least likely to toss alien eggs out.
National Portrait Gallery's sultry Carmen cover enough to make a cuckoo blush
After all those chaste Christmas carols of recent days, it made a refreshing change at lunchtime on Boxing Day to hear a woman singing a cheerful song about her sex drive.
Gallery-goers all know that Elvis is in the building at the National Portrait Gallery (thanks to its Elvis at 21 exhibition) and on Thursday for a few minutes Carmen Miranda (inset) seemed to be in there, too.
One of the fruit-hatted performer's greatest hits, the toe-tapping Tico Tico song, echoed through the galleries. One half expected the portraits to bob around a little. Hurrying to where the sound was coming from, it proved to be not Miranda herself (for she and the fruit in her hats perished in 1955) but flautist and chanteuse Leila Gato, accompanied by guitarist Michael Dalvean, of the Night Cafe combination. They were playing and singing Cuban and Brazilian ditties inside the NPG in one of the centenary year's ''Musical Offering'' concerts. Toes tapped and bodies twitched as Ms Gato sang the song popularised in the 1947 movie Copacabana and in which a liberated woman sings about her libido but disguises it (but only very thinly) as a song about the cuckoo in her cuckoo clock. In summary the song goes.
Oh tico-tico tick! Oh tico-tico tock!
This tico-tico - he's the cuckoo in my clock.
And when he says: ''Cuckoo!'' he means it's time to woo …
Oh-oh, I hear my little tico-tico calling,
Because the time is right and shades of night are falling.
I love that not-so-cuckoo cuckoo in my clock:
Tico-tico tico-tico-tico tock!
They don't write songs like that any more.
