The sulphur-crested cockatoos of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens are old hands at posing for pictures.

"YOU DON'T want to go to Australia," a well-meaning friend half-jokingly advised a few years ago. "It's nothing but poisonous snakes, killer jellyfish, unbearable heat, and a big red rock sitting out in the middle of nowhere."

You're wrong, I had replied. Australia is full of parrots - budgies, cockatiels, lorikeets and cockatoos - and I want to see them.

"I didn't notice any parrots when I was there," my friend said. As I surfed travel sites earlier this year planning our first trip Down Under, I had to admit I wasn't finding parrots, either. The box jellyfish, desert temperatures and Ayer’s Rock were all prominently mentioned. So were the Sydney Opera House, Great Barrier Reef, kangaroos and koalas. But not one tour package touted parrots. How could this be? I knew they were considered pests in some parts of the country, but so were kangaroos, right?

If Australia had parrots, you sure couldn't tell from the glossy brochures my travel agent handed me. Judging from its promotional literature, Australia was chockful of anything but parrots. This concerned me. If Australians were pushing koalas that hard, did this mean the parrots were not worth seeing? Or was it just a matter of economics? Perhaps there were simply more people clamoring to see marsupials than parrots, and Australians wanted to cash in on the tourist dollars.

Sydney's cockatoos and lorikeets know a meal ticket when they see one.

Whatever the reason, I had a sinking feeling I was about to repeat my Costa Rica experience. Apparently, I am the only person in modern history to have spent two weeks traveling Costa Rica without seeing a single parrot. And the scary thing was, Costa Rica advertised its parrots.

Giant bird in the sky
We decided to start in Sydney and fan out from there. We would just have to cross our fingers that "Breakfast With the Kangaroos" would include parrots, too.

I booked a few days in Cairns for snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. Then, just for Paul, I arranged a stopover in Tahiti on the way back. He had always wanted to see French Polynesia.

We left San Francisco at 2 p.m. on a Friday. After three planes, two layovers and a total of 30 hours in transit we arrived in Sydney almost exactly two calendar days later, thanks to the time-travel magic of the International Date Line. We felt remarkably chipper.

Sydney was sunny and mild. On our way out to dinner that night we sighted our first bird - or was it? A large winged creature flapped languidly across the early evening sky and into the trees across the street from our hotel.

"What was that?!" we exclaimed in unison.

"That was no owl," I said excitedly. "Too big."

We had been in Australia for only five hours and already I had broken the Curse of Costa Rica. Everything was going to be okay.

Early the next morning we set off on foot, eager to explore Sydney. We quickly stumbled upon the jewel of the city, the Royal Botanic Gardens. A huge, well-groomed park, the 188-year-old Gardens is 30 hectares - a little over 74 acres - of lawns, pathways, waterways, and labeled plants and trees. It reminded me of Central Park minus the sports fields.

Australia's crested pigeon is actually a dove with an unusual topknot.

As we wandered about enjoying the view of Sydney Harbor and marveling at botanical specimens such as the bottle tree, we saw them. Our first genuine wild cockatoos.

Up the pathway at a park bench a man and a couple were feeding several magnificent-looking sulphur cresteds. We approached the happy little group and loitered nearby, admiring the cockatoos and oohing and ahhing.

Minutes passed and we continued to watch enviously as the cockatoos climbed all over the couple and took their pieces of bread. A pair of rainbow lorikeets lapped powdered Nekton out of the man's hand. This was getting unbearable.

Finally, the man held out a bag of peanuts. "Here," he said, motioning for us to help ourselves.

"Oh, thank you!" we said gratefully, accepting the bag. The cockatoos were robust wild birds with broad backs and muscular chests. Their sharp nails dug into my arms but they took the peanuts from our fingers with exceptional gentleness. I wondered just how tame they were. I tried to stroke the back of one bird that was busy eating. Quick as a flash he took my wrist in his powerful beak. After a couple of seconds he released me and went back to munching peanuts.

"Probably shouldn't have tried that," Paul observed. "Nope," I agreed. It had been nothing more than a hard pinch; on the other hand, there was no point in risking a trip to an Australian emergency room for stitches.

Cockatoos in the pillyhilly
The man who seemed to be coordinating our cockatoo encounter introduced himself as Edmund. He wore a scraggly beard and some type of work uniform. He said he had been coming to the Gardens for years to feed the birds, which also included pigeons and sacred ibises, a lanky white African bird with a bare black head and long curved beak.

According to Edmund, a flock of about 40 cockatoos and 15 rainbow lorikeets lived in the park. The official word was no feeding, but Edmund paid it no mind. “We got into it once,” he said of Gardens authorities. “Now they leave me alone.”

Rainbow lorikeets are fairly common in city parks.

In a nearby tree called a pillyhilly, a cockatoo crouched on a branch, begging another bird for food. Each time the full-grown youngster edged closer, the weary parent walked farther up the branch. Finally it bestowed a regurgitated treat, to much flapping of wings.

The cockatoos seemed to prefer mingling with strangers only when Edmund was around. They must have liked having a familiar intermediary.

The lorikeets were more outgoing. Later that day in another part of the Gardens we spotted two lorikeets in a bottlebrush tree and called to them half jokingly. In a flash they were on my arm, worrying my watch band, and then pinching me hard when I produced no food.

The mystery solved
Near the concessions, we heard a huge flock of birds fussing in the fig trees. They sounded like conures, but this was not South America, and all we saw were giant seed pods hanging from the branches. Hundreds of them.

The closer we got, the more confusing the scene became. The pods now occasionally unfurled wings and embraced fellow pods, which struggled and screamed.

Grey-headed bats, also known as flying foxes, roost upside down in a Royal Botanic Gardens tree.

Finally, it dawned on us. We were looking at bats - big ones - Australia's native grey-headed "flying fox."

So it was a giant bat that had buzzed us the night before. And here were perhaps two thousand of them, about half engaged in noisy bat sex.

Six months from now, the females would bear a single baby, which would cling to her for another six months until it was almost as big as she was.

When the bats weren't mating, they drowsily fanned themselves with their wings, actually skin membranes stretched between elongated "fingers".

"Look at them all!" we exclaimed over and over, craning our necks as we wandered beneath the bat-laden trees.

As the sun went down the bats wrapped their wings around themselves tightly and prepared to settle for the night. They looked down their dog-like muzzles at us with their big dark eyes.

According to the Gardens Web site, flying foxes have visited the park for over 150 years. The first recorded invasion was in 1900, when several thousand stripped the trees bare. The damage was so great the city had to hire "sportsmen" to shoot the bats, which did not visit again in large numbers until 1989.

One of the largest bats in the world, Australia's flying fox boasts a three-foot wingspan.

Since then, the camps have fluctuated. It appeared we had just missed the Gardens' largest recorded bat invasion yet - 7300 roosted there in 2002.

Luckily for the bats, these days noise-making devices are used to drive them away, at least in cities. However, they're still shot and poisoned in the country, and may soon be listed as endangered.

Breakfast with kangaroos - and cockatoos
We continued to hear and occasionally see wild lorikeets throughout Sydney, and a small flock of black cockatoos flew over us at the Taronga Zoo later that week. But our final brush with cockatoos came out in the country.

The next day we headed for the Blue Mountains National Park, a two-hour drive west of Sydney. Our guide, Chris Denison of Aussie Bush Adventures, picked us up at the entrance of our hotel at 7:30 a.m. in a small minivan.

Our first stop was a picnic area where Chris made breakfast and we saw our first wild kangaroos. Eastern greys stand about waist high and aren't as pugilistic as Australia's famous red boxing kangaroos.

As we wandered among the peacefully grazing 'roos, we heard screaming and looked up to see several sulphur crested cockatoos bouncing in the top branches of a towering eucalyptus. Feistier than the park cockatoos, these birds flew between the treetops with yellow crests erect and beaks open in full-throated screams. However, they weren't interested in us. None dropped down for a handout, which was probably just as well for them.

Our next stop was the small picturesque mountain town of Leura, but we could shop for Australian knickknacks anytime. It was Featherdale Wildlife Park we wanted to see.

Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens features fascinating flora, too.

The feathered residents of Featherdale
Once a backyard rescue in the Sydney suburb of Doonside, Featherdale is now a full-fledged zoo featuring many native Australian animals and birds. "I think you’ll be happy," Chris said with a twinkle in his eye as he dropped us off at the entrance. We had two hours to explore.

Featherdale doesn't do elephants, giraffes, the big carnivores or other typical zoo fare. Its specialty is direct access to Australian critters.

In the large center petting area, kangaroos and wallabies wandered about or lazed in the shade. Open-air enclosures held half a dozen koalas, one of which jumped to a crossbeam to be petted. The hair felt stiff and woolly, not soft, as I had imagined.

Behind a set of low split rails surrounding a tree milled a group of echidnas. This porcupine-like relative of the platypus is covered with stiff but harmless quills. It eats like an anteater using a long, earthwormlike tongue, but it lays eggs and suckles its young like a platypus.

A keeper arrived with a plate of ground hamburger and set it on the ground. The echidnas crowded around like puppies eating out of the same bowl and flicked up the bits of meat with their long pink tongues.

Hanging out with the echidnas were a couple of kookaburras and the strangest bird I had ever seen. Australia's tawny frogmouth is a small mottled owl the color of tree bark. As the name suggests, it has an incredibly wide mouth. Inside, it's bright yellow like a baby sparrow's.

A tawny frogmouth owl opens wide.

I sat down by a frogmouth. It regarded my pants leg, opened its beak wide like the world's largest hatchling and promptly annexed itself to me. When I proved too big to swallow whole, it released my leg and resumed staring off into space, occasionally blinking its big yellow eyes.

It was our first time fraternizing with emus, too, but the big ostrich-like birds weren't very friendly. They always kept a step ahead of my outstretched hand.

I was glad to see Featherdale's cassowaries behind a high split-rail enclosure. The birds plodded down the fenceline, their blade-like casques cruising by like shark fins. Native to New Guinea and the rainforests of northeastern Australia, this six-foot-tall cousin of the ostrich can disembowel a man with a single kick.

Before leaving Featherdale we got to see some flying foxes up close. I was having trouble photographing them through the mesh of their enclosure, so a keeper opened the door and let me go inside. They hung quietly by their claws, staring at me with their big liquid eyes.

Cairns washout
Our four exciting days in Sydney were at an end and now it was time to board a plane for the short flight to Cairns. Unfortunately, Cairns would soon be partially underwater.

I had made sure Queensland had begun its dry season before deciding on Cairns. However, an ill-tempered tropical storm named Fay had not checked the calendar. Within 24 hours of our arrival she was lashing Cairns with wind and rain and threatening to turn into a full-fledged cyclone.

We saw a few more bats, the mall, two movies and the inside of every restaurant and Internet cafe in town but, alas, not the Great Barrier Reef or even the crocodile adventure tour. By our second day there the roads were closed and all reef trips were canceled.

The potentially dangerous cassowary roams the rainforests of northeastern Australia.

With Fay expected to linger at least another week, we caught a flight back to Sydney where we dried out, saw a musical at the Opera House and took a city bus tour before packing our bags. With snorkeling in Australia a bust, we were glad to still have Tahiti to look forward to.

Give me more-a moa
Some people go to Tahiti to snorkel or lay on the beach. Although I did not know it yet, I had come to see the chickens.

We heard the peeping not long after checking into our beach bungalow on Moorea.

"Look! Chickens! And they have babies!" I gasped. There, on the manicured lawns of the Moorea Sheraton, just a couple of hundred yards away from the surf, wandered three plump hens trailed by their fluffy progeny.

Jungle fowl, or "moa" in the Hawaiian language, are common in Polynesia, but I'm always surprised to see them. These ancestors of the modern chicken brought to the islands 2,000 years ago live wild but look like they just wandered out of the pages of The Little Red Hen. We had seen moa at the rim of the Waimea Canyon on Kauai and other places far from civilization. I always marveled at the thought of them scratching out a living on their own. They looked like the pet bantams of my childhood, whom I still missed.

The Sheraton's chickens - I doubted they strayed far from their comfortable life here - looked well cared for. The two straw-colored hens had seven chicks apiece, some blonde and others with fetching brown stripes running down their backs. The third hen and her five chicks were a gorgeous jet black. "Almost 20 chicks! And they're all beautiful!" I gushed.

Paul sighed and rolled his eyes. Now it would be a week of nothing but talking about chickens, following them, and photographing them.

At mealtimes I convinced Paul to slip extra slices of bread into his pockets. When we got back to the room, I broke the bread into tiny pieces and kept them in a water glass to feed the chickens.

Every morning, the Sheraton's roosters, handsome fellows with shiny black tail feathers and orange capes, crowed us awake. Within the hour a hen clucked impatiently at our back door. While her chicks peeped plaintively down on the lawn, she would hop up onto the deck in one graceful burst of flight and nervously pace. Where was the handout?

I would toss the first handful of bread onto the lawn and the hen would quickly rejoin her chicks to supervise. I had forgotten what good mothers chickens are. No matter how hungry they may be, the kids come first. When they find something good to eat, the hens make a soft shurring sound. The babies know this means, "Come quick! I've found a tasty bug!"

As the chicks scurry over to investigate the tidbit, their anxious peeps turn sweet and happy sounding, like a bobwhite's call. If the food is too much for small beaks to manage - say a big fat worm or hard-shelled bug - the hen pummels it into smaller pieces before doling it out. Some of my pieces of bread were too large for the chicks to swallow. These the hen gently reclaimed for further food processing.

Only when her babies were fed, their little crops distended, would a hen accept food for herself and then she would eat ravenously. Instinct on her part or not, it melted my heart. Afterward the chicks crowded beneath mom for a quick snooze. Running about all day looking for food was exhausting when you were only a week old.

Chicks make a heart-rending “I’m lost!” peep when they become separated from their mothers. I was reminded of this when I picked one up. I just couldn't resist admiring it for a moment but quickly let it go.

One morning two hens and their broods showed up on our stoop at the same time. When I came out with breakfast, the hen I had thought of as somewhat shy viciously attacked the larger, more robust hen I had nicknamed "Big Mama." Soon, Mama was standing off to the side forlornly, while all seven of her chicks flocked to Mrs. Shy and her family to eat the bread crumbs I threw.

Each time Mama tried to approach her own children, Mrs. Shy gave chase and delivered another savage pecking. I threw some consolation bread to Mama, hoping this would fortify her enough to reclaim her chicks. But as Mrs. Shy moved off, all fourteen chicks followed.

Week-old jungle fowl roam the grounds of a Moorea hotel.

Cripes, what had I done? Poor Mama! And how could Mrs. Shy possibly feed 14 little beaks?

I slipped back inside the bungalow and watched through the sliding glass doors, hoping that if I butted out the situation would rectify itself.

I could hear Mama trying to entice her chicks back by giving her "Come here, I've found something to eat!" cluck. I felt horrible. I had ruined Mama's chicken paradise. I was a chicken home wrecker.

All the rest of that day I watched the grounds anxiously for signs of a reunion. Finally, I saw both Mrs. Shy and Mama at separate ends of the lawn, each trailed by seven chicks. Whew. Social order had been restored.

Goodbye, Mama
On our last day at the bungalow, I sat out on the deck tearing off bits of bread for the chickens. "Where are they?" I asked Paul. "I hope we get to see them again before we leave." Truth was, I needed the chickens more than they needed me. In fact, Mrs. Black and her five chicks always seemed plump and satisfied without my help. Another bungalow must be their benefactor, I thought jealously.

After checking out, we had an hour to kill in the lobby before our taxi came. By that time, we were sunburned and had run out of fresh clothes. Along with fastidious grooming I had abandoned caring what the other hotel guests thought of my bird watching and had taken to walking about everywhere with the water glass in one hand as if bread crumbs were my favorite beverage.

"I'm going to try to find the chickens," I announced, jumping to my feet with the glass of crumbs and my camera. Paul, his nose in a book, nodded without looking up.

I went back to our bungalow. No chickens. Down another paved walkway, I passed Mrs. Black and her chicks, who accepted a few crumbs. Finally I spotted Mrs. Shy and Mama on the same lawn not far from the lobby. I approached Mrs. Shy. "Here, chick, chick," I called. At first she did not seem to recognize me. When I held out the bread-crumb glass, she came running, chicks in tow. The chicks gave their little happy cries as they wolfed down the crumbs.

With the Shy family fed, I visited Mama at the other end of the lawn where she scratched under a tree just outside a bungalow. I felt a special connection to Mama, having almost ruined her relationship with her children. I found a comfortable place on the broad-leaved grass to sit down and proceeded to enjoy Mama and her little family one last time.

A Tahitian hen gathers her chicks.

After feeding the chicks, I treated Mama to several large pieces of bread, then I brought out the camera. Hoping I might have a few crumbs left, Mama stayed near. Soon, she and her babies were going about their business as if I weren’t there.

Mama scratched in the dirt and found a worm or some other agreeable chicken hors d'oeuvres. The chicks mobbed her to claim the prize. The day's heat, oppressive in the sun, was pleasant in the shade. The chicks drowsed in the grass for a while, then woke and stretched their tiny wings. As I watched I thought what a shame it was that most chickens never get to enjoy the outdoors or a mother hen's tender care.

I got up and brushed the bread crumbs off my skirt. "Goodbye, chickens," I said sadly. I noticed that at some point during my little visit with the chickens, the nearby bungalow's curtains had been drawn.

Next time, cockatiels
After returning home I read that cockatiels and budgies roam most of Australia except the coastal towns - which is where we were, of course. We had also had the bad luck of arriving in Cairns just when Fay wanted to check in. Who knows what kind of bird life we might have seen there (aside from wild cassowaries, to whom I was not eager to offer bread crumbs).

But how could I complain? We had seen exactly 100 percent more birds than in Costa Rica, and some kangaroos, koalas and many other proper Australian tourist attractions to boot. And I hadn't even stepped on a stonefish.

ParrotChronicles.com

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