"Seen this evening [Monday]," a reader reports, sending us this picture, "a bronze statue in Hughes with a heart."
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Yes, even a heart made of bronze is a warmer, throbbinger thing than the hearts (just pebbles, really) of those in our government who drive our cold and unChristian refugee policies.
The observant reader captions his photograph Stepping Out For Refugees and that's because the statue's true name is Stepping Out. Created in 1997 by Giovanna Ianniello and Gerard Murphy she is an almost life-size 1950s shopper stepping out, with her shopping bag, at Hughes shops.
Approachably popular, she receives quite a lot of attention. During the recent winter she wore a donated scarf and occasionally, wittily, flesh-and-blood shoppers tether their dogs to her while they are shopping so that she looks as if she is stepping out with a dog. This columnist has always been fond of her and the discovery that she and I think alike on refugee matters only deepens that fondness.
A woman of her sensitivity is bound to be a bird lover but we hope we don't offend her with today's risque photograph.
A certain type of reader is always asking for this column to show some pornography and so (because today's media outlets must try to appeal to every kind of client) we oblige today with this very recent photograph. It shows two Gang-gang cockatoos engaged in an act of passion.
But we use this picture not only as clickbait but also to alert citizen-scientists (yet another kind of client we try to appeal to) to an appeal for their help in trying to gather some breeding-season data about Gang-gangs, our faunal emblem.
As oft-reported here, although almost all Canberrans recognise the endearing species when they see and hear it the species is not well understood. For example we have no certain proof, yet, that they ever nest down here among us in urban nature reserves. Certainly some of them engage in some courtship and some (blush) copulation down here, but we have no conclusive observations, yet, of them successfully nesting here. This is a yawning gap in our information about the fowl that is our city's poster creature.
Now for the second season in a row the Canberra Ornithologists Group (COG) is running a Gang-gang breeding survey with which it would like some citizen-science help.
Last season's survey came to naught, COG's Chris Davey laments.
"Despite some promising observations about hollow preparations and nesting behaviour last spring, there were no positive breeding events recorded in Canberra's urban nature reserves."
So again COG is asking everyone who thinks they see Gang-gang breeding behaviour and associated hollow inspecting to get involved in a survey. If you spot Gang-gangs in action around potential nest hollows you'll find an on-line data-recording form at the COG website canberrabirds.org.au
Today's blush-making still picture is taken from a major (but very short) motion picture video just captured by Rawshorty. He saw and filmed two male Gang-gangs engaging in treetop biffo and then saw the apparent winner have a meaningful interface with the female who'd watched the encounter. http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The copulating Gang-gangs image is the latest in this column's occasional series in which we use readers' sometimes shocking pictures of ACT creatures being themselves. So for example we run pictures of them mating and getting involved in grisly acts of hunting and killing. We do this partly out of shameless clickbaiting but also to point out that contrary to so much soft wildlife photography wild things do more than just stand about striking pretty poses for pretty photographs.
Our city's brightly-plumaged cockatoos and parrots supply a lot of our city's incidental gaiety but they get some occasional help from human Canberrans.
Peripatetic, oddity-seeking Canberra photographer Mel Edwards has just noticed and promptly posted on her gallery/blog Nah it's Canberra http://nah-itscanberra.tumblr.com/ (much admired by this column) this gay abandoned splish-splash of colours.
You'll imagine, she teases, that what you're looking at is a "Panel for billboard of Milton Glaser's iconic Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, 1967 album cover. Smithsonian Design Museum, Upper East Side's Museum Mile in Manhattan, New York City".
But "Nah, it's Cat Mueller's 2015 painting on a panel of Canberra's iconic Mandalay bus, Haig Park carpark, Upper Lonsdale Street, Braddon, in Canberra City".