As I never tired of lecturing my spellbound University of Canberra journalism students, balance, like facts, almost always spoils a good story. And so, in keeping with these deeply-held convictions, I had hoped to get through 2014 without this column saying a kind thing about the NIMBY bourgeoisie of the Yarralumla Residents Association.
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But, frustratingly, news has just reached us of some members of the YRA doing a Good Thing.
For some years some bird-conscious Yarralumlans have enjoyed watching Sparrowhawks every season nesting and raising youngsters in the same stand of 48 trees. The Sparrowhawks, creatures of habit, are there again this season.
But, suddenly, horror! It emerged that the National Capital Authority was about to descend upon this copse to cleanse it of its dead trees. How would the adult and baby sparrowhawks survive the heavy, chainsaw-snarling lumberjackery of this assault?
But Yarralumla anxieties have been conveyed just in time and on Tuesday an NCA spokeswoman told us that the lumberjackery is now going to be "delayed until February" or, even later, until it's clear that the fledglings have flexed their wings and have left.
This gives us a perfect excuse to bring you, just once more, Jim Cottee's grisly photograph of a Sparrowhawk tearing apart a Crested Pigeon in Cottee's Lyneham garden. This year we have offered through this column an occasional series of pictures of birds being the beady-eyed killers they are. We have done this to balance out the wussy way in which birds are popularly and mistakenly portrayed and discussed as sweet, tweeting, feathered fairies.
