This week the Aussie Backyard Bird Count is on, asking people around Australia to spend 20 minutes a day tracking the birds they can see in their gardens.
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A few years ago, I moved to a house which backs on to a beautiful section of Illawarra rainforest. With cockatoos, kookaburras, fairy-wrens and magpies filling my backyard each spring, I have logged on to record the birds in my garden during the October bird count each year.
The problem is, the app doesn't like it when I log the first wild bird I see in my garden everyday: a bright blue and green Indian Peafowl, or pavo crisatus, to be scientific.
"Unlikely based on survey location," the app tells me each year.
But this peacock - who we have creatively named Mr Peacock, but who others in my street call Hank after his loud honking noise - has lived in Mount Ousley for two or three decades, according to my neighbours who remember him parading up the road way back when their now middle-aged children were young.
No one is sure exactly how he got there, but few residents can remember a time he wasn't. Perhaps he is somehow linked to the peacocks that used to live next to the University of Wollongong, across the motorway, or perhaps some eccentric homeowner tried to keep him as a pet long ago. Who knows?
He roams wild, spending most nights roosting on my neighbour's roof and mornings nested in a thatch of bamboo outside my bedroom window. I found him less charming than usual last summer, when his loud cries pierced through the night and woke my already unsettled newborn daughter. But now she's older, it's an absolute thrill to be able to show her such a striking bird.
In the afternoons, he disappears for a bit, or goes for a walk - setting off a cacophony of dogs barking as he roams the street. He pauses for no-one, so cars stop to let him pass, and he usually ends up resting on a front porch somewhere, just whiling away the time.
The other day, I spotted him standing at a neighbour's front door with their cat, who was cleaning its whiskers and ignoring the giant rainbow-hued bird.
Around sunset, he parades back down the street, through our garden and does a bit of a flappy sort of jump on to my neighbour's garage and up their roof to begin his daily cycle again.
Piercing cries aside, he's an absolute pleasure to have in our neighborhood. But the tale (ha) of Mr Peacock is a sad one too. After the summer is over each year, we see him pulling out his resplendent tail after it has once again failed to attract any peahens.
He spends winter looking like a bit of an over-sized blue and brown chicken, waiting for the day he can regrow his magnificent tail. And then each spring, the distinctive feathers grow back so he can once again show off, albeit to an audience consisting mainly of my adoring toddler, several upset dogs along the street, and his own reflection in our neighbour's laundry door.
But I suppose this existence as a perpetual bachelor has served him well if he's lasted 30 years as a wild bird. As I proudly log his presence in the Aussie Backyard Bird Count, I wonder what other unusual feathered creatures live out in the Illawarra.
Already this week, birdwatchers have counted more than 13,147 birds across the Illawarra. The count is open until October 27, with participants asked to spend 20 minutes on any day logging birds in their backyard. Last year, the rainbow lorikeet was the most popularly counted bird.