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Peter McLaren
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My interest in the affinity of budgies and eucalyptus trees began completely by accident when I was doing Aboriginal studies at university and had to visit central Australian Aboriginal communities.
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I noticed on my first trip that huge flocks of budgies would descend on particular trees just before dusk each evening and chew the leaves for an hour or so. They would make an awful racket until dark and in the morning there would be thousands of half-chewed leaves
littering the ground under the trees.
When I asked my Aboriginal colleagues what attracted budgies to these particular trees they told me that there were only five types of eucalyptus trees that budgies roosted in like this.
I began taking leaves of these trees home with me at the end of my field trips and giving a handful to two of my friends who had budgies. The birds use to go into quite a frenzy of chirping and they'd shake their heads from side to side as they shredded the leaves.
I'd brought home leaves from field trips a number of times when my sister from England visited me in 1997 and took some leaves home for her own budgie. They worked on him too and so she started giving them to a couple of friends who were budgie owners. Pretty soon I was
collecting a whole bag load of leaves every time I went on a field trip but when I'd finished my studies I had no occasion to return to the Outback.
Click the images to enlarge
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A eucalyptus tree after a flock of budgies has descended and stripped the leaves and the nuts.
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We took a close up photo of the attacked area with a white board background to highlight the incursions made by the budgies.
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One day I had an email from my sister asking for more eucalyptus leaves and so I went to the forest nearby and collected a handful of leaves from each of the various types of eucalyptus trees growing there. Before sending them off to England I went around to a
friend's place to try them out on his budgies. They didn't work.
I was quite surprised and so started to experiment with different eucalyptus leaves. There are over 600 species of eucalyptus in Australia and I found that, while a few types were mildly interesting to budgies, none worked as well as the five species from Central
Australia and some types went completely untouched by the birds. Furthermore, I learnt just where on the tree grew the leaves with the most oil in them. The tough old leaves at the bottom of the tree didn't excite the average budgie much at all.
The rest, as they say, is history. I found a source of supply and then sent samples to pet shops in a number of other countries and the ball started rolling. That was back in 1999 and in 2002 we finally went online with our own web site. We now have clients in 12
countries and we get letters in languages we have to get translated telling us how happy and perky our leaves have made their birds.
*To view some of the 600 very different species of eucalyptus trees click here
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