Sean Dooley

I am sharing the same country with you.

The fabulous country it is too.

G'day, Kirsty.

Thanks for having me on.

It's good to be back.

very good question there, Louis, and it's actually one I get asked a lot.

Australians tend to call any large black bird that goes, ah, ah, a crow, but we actually have five native species of corvids, crows and ravens, and they are really difficult to tell apart because they're so similar.

Visually, it's very difficult to tell them apart, but

The main difference between crows and ravens is physically, is if you were to catch one and blow on its feathers so that you could see the down at the base of the feathers, the ravens have a brown color down, whereas the crows have a white color down.

But it's something you don't see very often in the wild unless you're sort of very close to them in the middle of a cyclone.

Yes, and they're not particularly friendly birds.

Yeah, the corvids are a songbird family that has spread all around the world.

And they are found on every continent.

And they're one of those songbirds that we...

If people listen to your episode with Tim Lowe, he mentioned that Australia gave the world song.

Songbirds evolved in Australia and then island hopped once we connected with the islands north of us about 25 million years ago and then spread around the world to dominate the world.

uh the bird species list that half the world's birds are in the passerine family the corvids are a family that really uh developed overseas and then came back to australia and so overseas birds in the corvid family are the crows the ravens the jays and also the northern hemisphere magpies

which are actually in no way related to our magpies, which are an endemic family of Australian or Australasian birds.

They're also found in New Guinea.

And some of the wood swallows in that magpie family are found and have made their way into some parts of Asia.