Probably more than theory. The late Graham Pizzey's wonderful A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia has occasional passages describing the regional variations of bird vocalisings. The page on magpies…

There's one in our area that has a song uncannily similar to the start to 'Boogie woogie bugle boy' – I wish it would learn the rest...
... and they're so small for such volume!

Parenthood does that.

We have three chickens. Used to have at least three dozen, and a hard core group of free range egg buyers. Times change...but my three old, old girls still produce two ooh -ahh eggs per day, between them.

The drought of 2008 made us…

Finding examples of Riroriro song online, I now realise that one lived in our street when I was a child and I never knew what it was. Thanks Danielle (:

John: Yeah at work we’re building stuff like that – we already sell home wireless VOIP systems…

!6 years of the casual country kind of living where you might lock the doors and windows but everyone knows where a key is if they're passing and call in and we're not home.

Comfy, because the house dog(s) would…

At the moment weirdly my day job happens to involve building cheap wireless nternet-of-things devices ... this week I'm doing window window open/close sensors .... a little late I guess – in many ways I hate the idea of putting in…

Lots of people are not nice at all as well. These things are not mutually exclusive.

As you imply, it's not so much the lost chattels as the horrible sense of intrusion.

They've begun wandering through our back yard in the last year or so. Colin the Cat watches carefully from the deck with his WTF? face on.

Yes, forcible mating is fairly common in mallards, and sometimes results in the death of the female. Unfathomable.

Also male ducks are pretty awful, while we lived in Davis CA the route from my lab to my partners lab went over a pond – one day we witnessed a female duck being mobbed by a group of males – we came past…

I think humans get to judge animals approximately never. Given our record of laying waste not merely to individual animals, but to whole species, and whole ecosystems.

Word. Pukeko are Not Nice Birds. At all.

Killing stuff for fun is far more prevalent a hobby in nature than the average nature documentary wants you to think about.

Probably, and not entirely senseless on that account, since they may compete for similar food sources. Or perhaps their young do.

...makes them meatier.....http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/17129/roasted-wild-duck

Not necessarily – ducks are pretty terrible parents. Seagulls also like a tasty duckling meal (I have a vivid childhood memory of…

Auckland is getting this too. Tuis cavort in the trees around my section, and I've seen them in trees in at UoA. No kereru hereabouts, but at Waiheke they're everywhere – they seem to particularly love doing…

True story :P

The birds in Wellington! I've always lived near the edge of the bush, and I remember as a kid seeing a tui was something special. Then a while back I…

Love your work Lilith. I got something in my eye.

Arohanui.

For sure. The gift of making a bicultural TV show show is that I've had access to a deeper understanding of the Maori experience and way of thinking, and that common concept of…

When I was in the States I found the big West Coast cities more like NZ than anywhere else – San Francisco + north have similar weather, similar vegetation (lots of Monterey pines and…

I tend to agree with Jackson. The Otago landscape is part of my heritage and part of my character. I may not be able to express it as well as the poetry of Brian Turner. But it…

I find almost everything written in the post and the comments resonates with me. Home is alternately something I at times struggle with but sometimes feel completely comfortable about

I'm a 3rd generation…

This is an interesting thing, as I kind of feel like we do.

Literally tūranga (standing place), waewae (feet), it is often translated as ‘a place to stand’. Tūrangawaewae are places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are…

Thanks Chip. Genuinely touched.

Over the years that house has changed -…

What we Pakeha New Zealanders don't have is a turangawaewae – the property my grandparents bought in 1956 is still in our…

Yep.

We've been back in Wellington 8 months. I lived in Beijing longer than I lived in any particular place in NZ. Now I'm back in my hometown, my wife and I in our various versions of culture shock, our daughter happy and settled.…

I had a very different version of that moment in 2013. I stepped off a…

It was a period when we were…

Yeah, I totally get that. It's the place where people like us live.

PA folk who feel the same may also wish to chip in a little to this week's Bombathon pledge drive.

Sympathies from me as well, as a victim of middle-aged man falls over taking a photo and breaks arm" last year

For me home is a mixture. Growing up we moved fairly often, but only within the little town I grew up in so I never changed schools, just houses. That and moving regularly when I was at uni have…

My father also worked for a bank – but as he could mostly transfer between Wellington region branches, we were fairly solidly based in Lower Hutt, interrupted by a 5-year exile in Wanganui. Only the second Hutt place, and my grandfather’s place in Avalon,…

It will always be my parents' place in Mangere, bought in the 80s when it was ramshackle and barely a house at all, before expanding like an accordion and becoming the place where 4, 5, 6, and 7 people lived (and sometimes more). It stays, the…

I’ve never minded the bedroom…

All within Auckland, so the actual moves weren't…

I questioned my own involvement in the fracas you refer to, and will be mindful of what you say. I also felt something nostalgic about the community at the time. Overall, this has been a sanctuary from an uncaring world, and I hope it endures.…