Bin chickens carve a warm spot in Australia's heart even as they raid and thieve | Sean Dooley

While the ibis may be trailing in bird of the year, it has made it into the top 10 most commonly seen birds in the Aussie backyard bird count

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We recently took our children to Sydney for the first time. They loved it: the Manly ferry, the Opera House, hanging out on Bondi beach hoping to see some idiot tourist get pulled from the surf by the lifesavers from Bondi Rescue.

But perhaps their most lasting memory was provided by an ibis foraging around Circular Quay. When the first fleet unloaded its scurvy-sickened crew at the same site in 1788, there were very probably no ibis lurking. Their natural home was the wetlands of the Murray-Darling basin. They only started to become regulars in Sydney during the 1950s - perhaps not coincidentally around the time of the great surge in irrigation infrastructure that started sucking water out of the rivers and wetlands of their traditional territory.