A Bird Called Swoopy

About the Book

Swoopy is a black and white magpie who lives high up in a gum tree with his mom and dad, just near a golf course. One day when his parents are away finding food, he sees a pretty pink golf ball plop along the green grass below their nest. He flies down, picks it up, and takes it back up into the nest. He hears a man shout something below, but he doesn’t think anything is wrong, so he just closes his eyes and sleep. When his mum and dad come back to the nest, they tell him it is wrong to take things that don’t belong to you, and they push the ball from the nest back to the golf fairway. Swoopy hears what they are saying to him, but doesn’t really listen! And he keeps on taking balls from the grass below when he sees them. One day when he swoops down and picks up another golf ball, he gets a whack on his beak from a golfer who is cross! Swoopy is hurt and helped back up into the nest by his parents. The next day when he pushes the other balls he has hidden in his nest back onto the grass, a man calls out a big thank you! Swoopy never again took anything that didn’t belong to him! You might see him fly by one day.

About the Author

With four children under five, living on a small farm out of Melbourne, Australia he respected the need for careful education and sensible discipline and decided rather than remember the stories he’d told them the night before, he would put his stories down in writing so they could be read whenever they were wanted, or needed, to be read. Twenty years on his stories have been incorporated into two series of Life Lessons for Kids, one based on farm animals, another set based on wild animals and are still sought by parents and families around the nearby farming community, local schools and beyond.