Umbrellas out binches, it looks like the birds are angry again and want to exact sweet, sweet revenge on us non-winged humans. In a brand new TikTok, hundreds of birds can be seen sweeping an Aussie suburb, and I for one would like to take this as a warning.
You often see birbs sweeping the streets in small packs, minding their business, sitting on telephone wires and singing beautiful morning songs. However, in rare instances, your entire street could be covered with them, as they storm your city in the thousands.
Some may call this a natural bird occurrence, especially in Australia, but others may call it an act of instigating war.
Nowra TikTok user @justsheff33 (Sheff Sar) captured hundreds of birds flocking her street, and sitting on everything they could get their claws onto. I’m talking roads, houses, driveways, cars. Nothing can stop a bird on a mission, apparently.
Be a sticky-beak and have a look at the vid below:
@just_sheff33 #wildlife #birds #australia #sunset #dream #attackontitan #cockatoo #sydney
The birds in the vid appear to be corellas, but could also be your standard cockatoo. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a mix TBH.
Whenever you see a mass of birds like this, some are also likely to be escaped birds who have joined a group, so there’s no telling what winged creatures make up the mass.
Corella invasions (in the thousands) are natural phenomenons that, while rare, aren’t exactly unheard of.
Professor Gisella Kaplan told the ABC in 2019, when the problem started to gain attention, that the birds are likely fleeing inland from their original homes due to excessive heat, or lack of food and water.
“Corellas prefer to move in small flocks of 20 or 30, but what we have seen in the last [few] years in Western Australia and South Australia and occasionally in Sydney, is huge flocks of thousands, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their numbers have increased,” she said.
“It can mean that they have all fled from somewhere and flocked together … in most cases, it happens when there is a dire shortage of food and water or the heat gets so bad they have to flee.
“We need to help them survive because in some cases it could be that the huge flock may be the sum total of all the birds that exist in that state and that entire huge region.”
So yeah, that TikTok vid could basically be every corella in the Nowra region. Wild.
Here’s a 2018 video from the Guardian showing a similar invasion, but in Adelaide. This one, however, isn’t as scary because it’s not on a street, where the birds can gain intel as we go about our daily lives.
Stay vigilant, my non-winged friends. Be wary of the birds.
