Way Down Vietnam Way: Birds!

So we did not actually see these guys, but they were the first thing that came up when I googled "cute birds." And, I thought they'd grab your attention and be a great way to introduce our blog post entirely about....birds! (and, indirectly, about the fact that we are indeed 80 at heart). In all honesty, the birds (or at the very least watching Matt chase after the birds with our dinky camera) have been a constant source of joy since we've arrived. And Sunday morning, we got a real treat. We were awoken at 6:30 by what sounded like a cross between a turkey gobble and a child yelling. We'd heard the noise before - every once and a while these great flocks of angry turkey-children fly across our sky squawking away in the distance. But this time, they were close, lighting on rooftops mere streets away! We immediately threw some clothes on grabbed crackers for our pathetic efforts to lure them to us and went out in search of the mystery birds. It proved to be a fantastic morning. While we never got that close to the birds, we did get a few good views. And, because we were up so early, we were able to see our sleepy neighborhood wake up. We weren't the only people on the street, but we were definitely some of the few. The lack of background noise from cars, conversations and fruit vendors using microphones to advertise their products meant that often the only sounds we heard were the trilling of birds and the flittering of their wings.

*This is where we tried to upload a video so you could hear the sound, but couldn't make it work.*

After a pretty extensive internet search, turns out the birds we followed were Yellow Crowned Amazons. Since our camera is pretty sad, and we're not photographers, I opted to steal pictures from the internet (where noted) to show what we saw. Hopefully this will be appreciated, as here is a sample of what most of our pictures look like.