As much reported here, it is now the most ogled and most photographed individual wild creature of any kind in the ACT's history. It is often seen posing on branches with its latest kill and this has dovetailed nicely with this column's controversial occasional series of readers' pictures of Nature at its most shocking. Here is Brian Jones' recent picture of the owl with the remains of a bird (there's the horrifying possibility it might be a Gang-gang cockatoo).

Back to avifauna in a moment but first a small, patriotic digression. Yes, we have just learned who the Australians of the Year are, but now it is time for this opinion-forming column to give its contrary award for the unAustralian of the Year. Tremble, Australia!

This year, just days after the Australian Country Music Awards at Tamworth, we unhesitatingly give the award to all those Australian country music artists who talk in their own unaffected voices but who take on ludicrous Texan accents the moment they begin to sing. This is, like Tony Abbott's monarchist anglophilia, a kind of unAustralian cringe we should have long since grown out of. It is especially awful when the offenders are crooning about Australia. Alas Kasey Chambers, at Tamworth winning two Golden Guitars for Best Album for her Bittersweet, is one of our cringe singers. On YouTube you can find her and co-artist Bernard Fanning having an onstage chat in their natural voices and then, launching into Bittersweet, becoming magically transformed into things born and bred in Nashville.

It doesn't have to be like this. At Tamworth a Golden Guitar winner was Luke O'Shea, in part for his Three Brothers, a song of the Great War. There are, thank goodness given that this is such an Australian subject, only a few Texan intonations in his unaffected performance. Here is a role model for all of you, thou unAustralian Australian country music crooner-cringers.

But we flutter back to our native birds (always using their own calls and never affecting the calls of birds of other lands) and to Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (henceforth SCCs).

Loyal readers will recall an initial reflection here that Gang-gang Cockatoos almost always hold what they are eating in their left "hands". Probing, in our Walkley-seeking way, we strayed to some published scholarly Macquarie University research on Australian parrots. One of the scholars' findings was that they didn't once see a "right-handed" SCC.

We knew when we then asserted (Gang-gang, 16 January) that there may not be such a thing as a "right-handed" Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (SCC), that this would cause a frenzy of twitching. One of those set a'twitching is ...

"Ian, after following with interest the recent references to the handedness of our native avian fauna and being somewhat of a sceptic, I took a longer, more detailed look at the gang of SCCs that frequent my local neighbourhood here in Rivett. After several minutes of intense observation of the cockies taking apart the Thuja trees that line the driveway I was ready to accept that indeed, all cockatoos are left-handed. Then, as one of them plucked a branchlet full of cones from the tree whilst standing on the neighbours' roof, I noticed that it was being held in its RIGHT CLAW!

"Was this just a fleeting aberration or was it the rarest bird in Australia I wondered as I raced to find a camera. [Eventually] I managed to zoom in and get a good picture of the bird (attached). I am sorry to have proved you and your learned friend that assured you that all parrots were left handed, wrong, but the evidence speaks for itself."

We knew you'd all find this a boffin-challenging challenge, but to be clear, the Macquarie scholars didn't say that there is no such thing on earth as a right-handed SCC. What they said was that they they didn't see a single one while doing their research and that they thought this noteworthy. In a nation blessed with several million SCCs it's inconceivable that there will be no righties. SCCs seem to be overwhelmingly left handed, so that when you see one being right-handed you are seeing something fairly unusual (like a member of federal cabinet who doesn't dye his hair) but not something unknown.

In this connection I report that one day last weekend at the fabled Garran shops, a little girl tugged at her mother's skirts and, pointing with a chubby finger, trilled "Mummy! What's that funny old man doing?"

"Come away, Persephone. It's rude to point," her mother chided, while wondering herself why a funny old man was standing stock still staring up into a pistachio tree.

The funny old man was me. As I write, at Garran shops the SCCs are busy in that place's pistachio trees. The birds hold up fruit-festooned branchlets to their bills. In the wake of the Macquarie research I have been coming out of the shops with my groceries but stopping to look for a right-handed SCC. In all of my deliberations of recent days I have seen (giving a twitcher's whoop of joy) just one SCC doing a right-handed thing, once.