I suppose it's thinking 'There used to be mangrove here.'
Leon, when you say ' a very large book on birds of Australia' do you mean a field guide or a coffee-table picture book. Picture books are lovely but you need a field-guide for ID. If it takes forever to ID your first birds, don't worry. Our first ID was the zebra finch. There were literally hundreds of them around a water tank, so we had no trouble seeing the markings. It still took us 45 minutes to work out what they were! Eventually I could ID them just by sound (not any more though). Initially of course it takes ages just to work out that it's a finch (or a heron or honeyeater or...) but once you're past that it gets much easier. You also get better at remembering and describing the markings. We found that his and her binos worked better than 'sharing' (ie arguing over) one pair (and of course the little bugger always flies off just as you are exchanging the binos.)
Bird watching is great fun - and cheap too!
