Most of the native birds that arrive in the ACT do so under their own, wing-flapping steam. However, on Thursday, 10 Bush Stone-curlews arrived, chauffeured, by road from Albury.
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How are we to explain these fowls' assisted passages to our welcoming territory?
Jason Cummings, general manager of The Capital Woodland and Wetlands Conservation Trust, explains that the imported 10 represent the second phase of attempts to establish a population of these striking-looking, large and slender and mainly nocturnal fowls at the Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary.
With five males and five females, there are high hopes they will find one another alluring and breed.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then here is some background to this project.
Cummings declares that the species was once quite abundant in parts of southern Australia but rare today. Despite being once native to the region, it is 50 years since they have been seen at large in the ACT.
Artful foxes are strongly suspected (although habitat loss is bound to be a factor in the species' decline).
Cummings says the stone-curlews' relative abundance in the north is probably because there are fewer foxes.
The birds have evolved to save themselves from predators by staying still and crouching down. However, foxes hunt not so much with their eyes as with their finely tuned noses and can pick up whatever aroma stone curlews give off.
Around Mulligans Flat, foxes have wreaked some curlew havoc.
Of the 11 stone-curlews reintroduced to the sanctuary last year, six met a foxy fate. The late curlews were equipped with tracking collars and their melancholy remains pointed to a foxy predator. Of course, the sanctuary itself, so splendidly fenced, is fox-free. However, when the late six flew away from the sanctuary of the sanctuary, they went out into a fox-infested world.
Of the initial 11, three are still reserve residents, and are apparently content in the woodland with lots of fallen wood debris, which the species is known to adore.
Cummings and his team hope the presence of these three will help "anchor" the newcomers when they "see that their cousins think this is a good place to stay".
While the new arrivals are in the ACT, they will not be released until spring when there is an abundance of insects to feast on.
However, reintroducing the species is a fraught exercise so, Cummings cautions, any good news on how well the species is faring is bound to be tempered with the occasional setback.
As long as the curlews stay in the roomy reserve, they will be safe (and in the wild they often choose to stay put). However, it is a jungle out there, beyond the fence, and it will be a miracle if there are no casualties.
Cummings says it is important that the community knows about these realities and appreciates what's involved in the important business of trying to restore a species to a place where it belongs.
And so, from spring, bracing ourselves for some sometimes bad news (in the same way that the everyday contents of The Canberra Times are a mixture of heart-warming joy and of chilling horror), this column plans to begin a weekly report on the species' progress in and around the sanctuary.
To assist Canberrans to engage with the birds and their fortunes, we may, Cummings laughs, even if it is anthropomorphic of us, give each a human name.
The original 11 were given names, including Rowena, Ralph and Harry. Of course, to do this, to feel so much closer to the birds, it will make things more painful when, and if, our weekly reports have to include the occasional death notice.
Perhaps, so as not to be speciesist as well as anthropomorphic, we should, too, give human names to any notorious, identifiably individual foxes in the Mulligans Flat region. We could give them appropriately unflattering names, like Machiavelli, Rasputin, Jack the Ripper and Moriarty. In this Labor city, some of you may, uncharitably, wish to call them after members of Tony Abbott's leaky Cabinet.
However, when you are a migrant from rural England (and I am a chip off the block of idyllic East Anglia), it is possible to know in your head that foxes are vermin that deserve to die, while in you heart, still have a fond, irrational niche for them, just as you have for hedgehogs.
Some of us, as impressionable English urchins, were read A.A. Milne's touching The Three Foxes.
Once upon a time there were three little foxes
Who didn't wear stockings, and they didn't wear sockses,
But they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses,
And they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.
