ZigzagAustralia
On the day you arrive in Australia, one of the first things you notice are the different birds, different plants and trees and even a different smell in the streets. If you have grown up here, you probably are used to all of this, but for the rest of the world the Australian birds seem large, beautiful, maybe a bit aggressive, but especially loud, very loud!
You never know what you can expect, because the only birds looking familiar are the pigeons and seagull, the rest is almost undiscovered territory. Any sound can be related to anything.
One of my first impressions kept me awake for quite a while. It was literally the first day I moved to Australia and I did not have a place to live yet. I stayed in the lodge of my work, which is in a nice suburb of Sydney with many trees. Early in the morning I woke up, still with a jetlag, suddenly realising that the place is surrounded by monkeys! Now this is kind of weird: you are in Australia, so you can expect kangaroos, koalas, dangerous snakes and spiders everywhere, but no monkeys.
The next morning someone made sure, that there are indeed no monkeys, the sound was from a kookaburra. How do you say? You have to repeat this several times and ask how to spell the name of this bird. The sound of the Kookaburra is getting familiar now, you can hear it almost every day and I actually like it, but still the first thing that comes to mind is “monkey-bird”.
Try to say: “Oeh-Ah-Ah-Oe-Ah-Oe-Ah-Oe-Oe-Oe-Oe-Ah-Oe-Ah-Ah-Ah”.
Now repeat this several times as fast and as loud as you can with a high voice and put in a few more “Oehs” and “Ahs” randomly.
This is more or less the sound of a kookaburra, now if you want to check how you are doing, or you are reading this in your office, and you feel a bit embarrassed to making yourself look like a fool, here is an example of the kookaburra sound.
The kookaburra is very popular animal in Australia, and is “used” in many places. There are post stamps with kookaburras, and the Australian men’s hockey team is better known as “the Kookaburras”.
- For more information you can see Wikipedia.
