And sure enough wildlife photographer and bird authority Geoffrey Dabb found rapt Canberra native fowls taking note of the Eurovision news at exactly the dawn moment that human Australians were receiving it from Vienna. The ornithologists among you will know that not all birds are, strictly, songbirds, but it is exciting to see from our picture that all sorts of Canberra bird species, songbirds or not, take an interest in music and song.

Geoffrey Dabb, inviting us to notice the preponderance of the Swedish national colours (blue, yellow and white) in this composition reports that "In view of the remarkable degree of interest in the event here, my aim was to show the incongruity of our own feathered friends waking to the morning sun at the same time the votes were being counted and being infected by the same unlikely enthusiasm shared by so many Australians."

Goodonya, Sweden's winner, Sweden's Mans Zelmerlow. This columnist's fondness for Swedish songsters dates from my many years of being a reporter at the Australian Open tennis fortnight. There, while all Australian fans courtside could manage was the pathetic screech of "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" exuberant Swedish fans would come to a court to support a Swedish player with a whole repertoire, a whole secular hymnbook of dozens of ditties, choruses and chants to warble. They turned every match they attended into not only a sporting contest but also a concert. And, always in full Swedish regalia, they would sometimes turn good-naturedly to the Aussie fans there and, jabbing forefingers at them, chant "We are yellow, we are blue. We are Swedish. What are you?" The Australian fans, unused to these sorts of intellectual/philosophical challenges, were never able to answer back and say what they were, for we are a young and nervous country, and have yet to discover a national true self.

As it happens your columnist, still jet-lagged, has just been in Scandinavia, in Norway, getting the impression that the Norwegians know who they are.

What must it be like, one wonders, wistfully, have an agreed national hero? Doing our Norwegian homework we find historians saying matter-of-factly as if it is a truism that Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) the Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate is Norway's "national hero". He seems to have been a remarkable man of accomplishments galore. What's more, commandingly tall, athletic, blue-eyed and gorgeous and Viking-looking (eerily like Mark Rummukainen the captain, of Finnish extraction, of the all-conquering CBR Brave ice hockey team) he was utterly statuesque.

Readers, if we were to think of anointing someone as our national hero, is there anyone or anything (for some of you may want to nominate Phar lap, a thing) to fill those important national shoes (or in our case perhaps national thongs)? Do we have anyone Nansenesque? For some of us John Howard is not enough. Is it just me, or isn't there a kind of yearning, patriotic ache in the place in our national psyche where, in theirs, the lucky Norwegians have, on a pedestal, their Nansen? Do contribute your thoughts on this to this soul-searching column.

Meanwhile, mention above of Canberra birds' intelligent interest in Eurovision coincides for us with experience of a sweet and superstitious little ritual carried out every day at a tennis club in Canberra's north.

This columnist, waiting there on Tuesday to play with my young, Nick Kyrgios lookalike tennis coach Avi Baskar, saw two emeritus club members finish playing and then, before they left, painstakingly decorate the court with a dozen metre-length lengths of black, plastic hose pipe.

"Why do they do this?" I asked the magpie that was my only companion there while I waited for my Kyrgiosesque friend.

"Oh Ian, you'll never believe it," he chortled.

"The credulity of humans never ceases to amaze! Club members have seen some of us plucking tufts out of the synthetic grass court and they've come up with the quasi-religious belief that lengths of black plastic hose look like snakes and will frighten us away! Hilarious! But as you well know Ian (for you have reported in your award-winning column how scientists have shown us to be as intelligent as chimpanzees while you yourself are campaigning for us to be given the vote in time for the next Assembly elections) we are a very smart species and are not deceived.

"It's all reminiscent, isn't it," he continued, "of the old and enduring folkloric belief that bottles of water placed on a Canberra front lawn will stop dogs fouling the lawn because dogs in the wild (as wolves, perhaps, or as dingoes) will allegedly never foul a drinking place.

"What happens of course is that dogs, seeing the bottles on a lawn (the containers not reminding them for a moment of water in a billabong or a stream), go up and territorially mark them when, otherwise, they'd have left the place alone!

"Here, at best the bits of hose, stiff and inert, look like dead snakes. So they're no deterrent at all to us intellectual maggies. And in fact, excuse me for a minute while I go and do some tuft-plucking before you and your coach take up the court."

And with that, away he soared, chuckling to himself about Canberrans and their suburban foibles.