I have lived in Australia my whole life, some fifty plus years.
On my recent holiday in N.S.W, I was lucky enough to encounter these two birds.
They are blue winged Kookaburras.
It is very common to see Kookaburras sitting up on the power lines or fences.
In my experience they are fairly timid and fly off if they come into close contact with humans.
The first bird was happily sitting on a balcony railing of our accommodation and didn’t mind me creeping up on him to snap some shots.
The second chap below was sitting in a tree at the local beach at eye-level.
He also seemed to not mind being my photographic model for a few minutes.
This is the closest that I have ever been to a kookaburra.
These photos are my first Kookaburra photos and will not be my last, now that I know I have 10 Kingfisher varieties to capture on my camera.
Today I found the following very fascinating facts about our Kookaburra’s from
the NSW Office of Environment & Heritage
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The Laughing Kookaburra is the world’s largest Kingfisher.
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We have 10 different Kingfisher Species in Australia. They are the azure, forest, collared, sacred, little, yellow-billed and buff breasted paradise kingfishers and the blue winged and laughing kookaburras.
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They mate for life and live in the same place for most of their life.
All Australian School children will no doubt learn the Australian Song,
“Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree”.
It is a favourite for singing rounds in primary school choirs.
Older children love to change the lyrics to
“Kookaburra sits on an electric wire, jumping up and down with his pants on fire.”
If you are interested click on the youtube link below to listen to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysaskdFpPz8
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Linny J Creations 
Beautiful photos. I grew up in California, USA, and we sang the Kookaburra song as a Girl Scout. It was something we sang “in rounds” when we were camping out. I enjoyed the link to the videos and it brought back great memories of the song. Never gave it a thought as a child what or where a Kookaburra came from or the origin of the song. I learned something today, and enjoyed looking through& listening to you-tube & the Australian children’s songs.
I am so happy that you enjoyed reliving your girl scout days with the video of the song. I had never given it a second thought that children outside of Australia would learn this song. Great to hear that you sang it when you were in girl scouts. It is perfect for singing “in rounds”. Have a great day. Cheers Linny
Shared a link to your blog post on my Facebook page today. Hope it inspires some of my friends too.
Thank you for the link, 🙂
Nice photos! The kookaburra is one of my all time favourite birds, they just look so proud of themselves.
I love them too Laura. Whenever I see them they look so chilled and relaxed, just sitting and watching the world go by. I always think of them as being happy animals because of their laugh.
Cheers Linny
Lovely captures….They are Beautiful.
Thank you.