Thus far all my attempts to hold conversations with them (for an ethical issue has arisen between us that I very much want to discuss with them) have been in vain. Coincidentally a new book about creatures and communications, Ed Yong's An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us, is tickling thinking minds.

Yong is interested in what animals might communicate to us if they could. But of course, he reminds us, humans perceive the world in one way while every other species experiences everything in its own way and so "even if a lion could speak, we would not understand him", the philosopher Wittgenstein mused.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel identified the same impossible difficulty in his famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (we'll never have the foggiest idea, Nagel concludes) which could as aptly have asked What Is It Like To Be a gang-gang cockatoo?

Have the post-election GGs adopted my bosky bailiwick (as many as 16 of them in my garden at any one time) to thank me for voting Greenly and environmentally?

Perhaps, but it may be that the GGs' behaviour has little to do with the election or with any Franciscan charisma I radiate and more to do with the sunflower seeds I sparingly put out for them.

The aforementioned ethical issue arises from the way in which while one wants GGs to be authentically wild things (aloof from us in the ways wild leopards, platypuses and albatrosses are) some of the GGs themselves have other ideas.

When one arrives out in the garden with sunflower seeds to transfer to the bird tables there are always ambushing GGs quick to come and perch on us, eating from our bowls and hands before we can put the seeds down anywhere.

Rapture! And no one is going to tell an august faunal emblem to "Bugger off!" And yet.

Of course it is a wondrous thing to have an utterly wild bird stand on one's forearm to eat. Once ensconced the GGs stay on one's arm for ages. They are meditative, forensic, nibbling diners and will stay perched on you for as long as it takes them (15 minutes is not uncommon) to finish.

Ogling them like this is less like bird watching than looking closely, half-swooning with delight, at a spellbinding painting in an art gallery.

But if I could talk to the GGs on my arms I would say something like, "Much as I love and admire you don't you think you give up some of your wild dignity when you come and sit on me like this, like a tame thing?"

"What if all the world's animal emblems, Alaska's moose, say, or California's grizzly bear, or the Northern Territory's wedge-tailed eagle, behaved like this? One expects an emblematic wild animal to exhibit wildness, not to behave like a kind of poodle."

But then if it could be bothered to answer, the clear-thinking GG on one's arm might answer "What's a 'poodle'? But as to the rest of what you say, you flatter yourself if you think I have alighted on you because you have some irresistible charismatic allure for me."

"When I see you and choose to alight on you all I see is a kind of a tree stump (and Ian, at 76 the wizened skin of your aged face and neck are indistinguishable from the rough bark of some of the eucalyptus species we have co-evolved with for millions of years) conveniently juxtaposed with a food source.

"And," the GG on one's arm might continue (mumbling because it has a beak full of seed) "take my advice that there is no point in you wondering what it's like to be a cockatoo when even human men and women are mysteries to one another, when left-leaning people like you are even baffled by what it must be like to be that primitively underevolved human sub-species, the Liberal voter."

"No, let all creatures that on earth do dwell be comfortable with the unsolvable sweet mysteries of Life."