Wednesday's super but grisly photograph of one of the ACT's black-shouldered kites tearing one of the ACT's mice to shreds (Geoffrey Dabb's graphic photograph is in the Canberra Ornithology Group's forthcoming photography exhibition that opens on Sunday) prompted Tony May to send us a picture of an aftermath of a suburban atrocity carried out by a currawong in the photographer's Pearce street.

"They have a lovely song but some terrible habits," he muses.

Yes, there can scarcely be a bird-conscious Canberran who hasn't seen currawongs doing something ruthless.

One terrible morning on Black Mountain this columnist saw a currawong swoop down again and again to pluck and take away and eat fluffy duckling after fluffy duckling that a mother maned duck had been ushering across the woodland floor.

The true bird-lover hardly knows what to do on such occasions. What seemed so appalling to an onlooking human was of course Nature being itself, being red in tooth and claw. Currawongs, too, have to eat. Currawongs had been doing this to ducklings here on the Limestone Plains for tens of thousands of years before there were any soft, white wussy humans here to see and be disgusted by it.

What would you have done, readers? Ashamed of myself for not intervening earlier, and then ashamed of myself for intervening at all, I threw an ineffectual stick at the currawong. And then, now ashamed of myself for fleeing from a scene that was unbearable to watch (a third layer of shame), I fled.

Currawongs and our relationships with them get quite some attention in biologist Tim Low's new book Where Song Began (an interview with the author about his book decorated a recent column). For example he voices doubts about whether we should be feeding meaty things to the big songbirds.

Many of us indulge our neighbourhoods' magpies and currawongs with mince and in Tim Winton's Cloudstreet Dolly gets a kick out having blood and beef juice on her hands when feeding birds. Low quotes a Sydney study that found that gardens to which currawongs and magpies and other big birds are attracted by our meat wind up having less than their shares of small birds because the predatory meat eaters eat them and/or scare them away.

Another intriguing observation of his own is that currawongs, normally happy to eat the chicks of any species, "will forgo meals of [noisy] miner chicks to win acceptance [by miner colonies, famous for their frenzied aggression]".

Noisy miners, colonies of which lots of Canberrans live close to, get a very bad press in Where Song Began because as well as their being for Low "the ultimate aggressor" they now exist in such teeming numbers that their hounding aggressions are altering distributions of other critters.

"They will turn on almost anything," Low reports, impressed but horrified at the same time, "koalas, cows, bats, pigs, snakes, lizards, people (some times) and birds big and small."

"Their aggression is often expended on animals of no (threat) consequence, such as ducks. Their 12 different predator alarm calls include one for snakes and another for birds of prey."

The c-word ("cull") enters the author's discussions of currawongs and miners.

Of course we all knew already that our Prime Minister is a loyal royalist and adores the Queen. But perhaps we didn't know until now, with the opening of the Parliament House – at work exhibition that he even has a pin-up picture of Her Majesty in his Parliament House office.

This behind the scenes exhibition and the swish little booklet that accompanies it is made up in part of photographs by Anne Zahalka of the usually unseen and unsung staff of Parliament House (a pleasure dome so enormous and complicated, with 5000 souls working there that it is better thought of as a mini-metropolis than as a building) going about their everyday work.

Zahalka was commissioned last year (25 years after the building opened) to photograph the ordinary but essential people who keep the stately mechanism ticking.

And so for example her pictures include one of a painter in the spray paint booth and another of gardeners trimming the hedges of the Formal Gardens to formal perfection. And then there's this touching one of a working-class cleaner being supervised by the Queen of England as she, the cleaner, cleans the Prime Minister's office.

In his foreword to the book Martyn Jolly says that "Everybody wants a behind the scenes tour" and that Zahalka's behind the scenes tour of the Parliament House, this "citadel", of this "self-contained city voyaging through time on its own temporal rhythms" is fascinating, "like the 'below stairs' bustle of majestic mansions, the below decks drills of mighty warships at sea".

It is irreverent of this republican columnist (off with my head!) to call the picture of the Queen a "pin-up". It is the famous Sir William Dargie "wattle painting" portrait of the Queen, painted in 1954 and capturing her as a vision in wattle yellow. What a spring it must put into our Prime Minister's step to see it every day as he arrives for work.

The Parliament House – at work exhibition continues until August 10.