 white with a tinge of blue and violet.
The younger birds resemble each other males and females colouring is similar, and are referred to as 'green' birds. Olive-green above, a lighter white with dark scalloping below and have brownish wings and tail. The bill is little browner in colour. Interesting the male birds don't fully acquire there adult plumage and colours until they are almost seven years old.
There are 18 species of Bowerbird in the world of which you will find in seven of which you will find in eastern and south-eastern coast of Australia. Male and females have very bright lilac, bluish eyes but are very different in other ways. The male is about 25 to 35 centimetres long, and his plumage is black with a glossy purple-blue sheen. The female is smaller and coloured with a shiny grey-greenish, dusky brown and dark brown with an off white or cream underbelly.
Bowerbirds are a medium sized bird that prefer the wetter forests and woodlands, and nearby open areas. The best known and the most documented of all the bowerbirds in Australia, is the Satin Bowerbird; the bird's fame partially stems from its practice of building and decorating a bower to attract females. Males decorate either end of the bower with, feathers, berries, snail shells, flowers, leaves and will collect and use predominantly blue objects they source out blue clothes pegs, are a favourite bits of blue plastic, like milk bottle caps, or straws blue ribbons and its not uncommon for then to use a little yellow in the mix.
The breeding and courting season runs from September to February and it is during this time you will find the males dancing, jumping and making exaggerated movements with his tail raised over his back all for the female, offering gifts, pointing his beak to the ground, flicking his wings around and showing off around his bower. All this is happening and he is making hissing, chattering, buzzing and creaking noises so much so his eyes bulge outwards!. If he has impressed her enough mating takes place.
Bowerbirds feed mostly on fruits throughout the year but will also eat larvae, spiders, small lizards and frogs the diet is supplemented with insects and seeds, leaves are often eaten during the cooler months. Their call in alarm can be very harsh a wheezing type hiss. They can also make continuous croaking type sounds, explosive churnings and whirring rattles. In display the males emit harsh chattering, buzzing and creaking churnings interspersed with loud ringing notes and mimicry of local birds.Ashley from TN asked us to design a fountain with Panda Bears and Lucky Bamboo. So we took on the challenge to create a very special fountain for Ashley.
We wanted to show off the main panda bear and to do this we carved out a cave for him to sit. In front of the panda bear we installed a 12 LED white light that shows off the water fall and panda bear. The water then flows from in front of the panda bear down a water fall behind the larger lucky bamboo.represents, was the one that took the Greater London Council to court over the "Fares Fair" campaign to challenge the idea of a fair fare policy for London?
Robert Neill: I well remember what Bromley did. It was absolutely right to do so, and I make no apology for that because that previous regime did not have a proper approach to fares- [ Interruption. ] The hon. Gentleman is showing us his freedom pass, and we have made it abundantly clear that that will continue to be protected. It is funded by Conservative-controlled London councils, I might add, so I will not take any lectures from anyone in the party whose previous Minister with responsibility for local government complained that local authorities were not charging enough and were not charging up to the maximum potential. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is on very safe ground to make any more interventions of that kind, if I might respectfully say so.
Robert Neill: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has been trying to get in for some time.
David Taylor: The hon. Gentleman is being most generous. He is pinning an awful lot on the band D council tax level, but that is not a good measure of the impact of council tax in the UK. In my constituency of North-West Leicestershire 75 per cent. of properties are below band D, whereas 60 per cent. of the properties in Bromley, which he partly represents, are band D or above. That must alter the argument that he is making.
On inflation, council tax may have doubled since 1997, but it increased at a greater annual rate in the period when the Conservatives were in government before 1997.
Robert Neill: At least the hon. Gentleman makes a considered intervention, unlike some others, and I have a great deal of respect for his knowledge of local government, but I must beg to differ with him. First, the band D measure is universally accepted as the intellectually and academically approved average. One only has to look at the work of Tony Travers, the well-known independent commentator, who has said that on a number of occasions. Secondly, the use of the band follows common sense, as the other bands are set as percentages in relation to band D, so band D gives the average. It is well established by all respectable public bodies-apart from those who may want to make a point of their own-that that is the best means of comparing like with like. I am sorry to have to disagree with the hon. Gentleman, but I am afraid that he is wrong on this one.
Robert Neill: I shall make a little more progress, if I may, but I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment.
also seen a shift of regulatory burdens and costs on to local authorities. The doctrine of the "unfully funded obligation" is the reality, if not the wording, of Government policy. Many local authorities will have experienced that in relation to concessionary fares, for example, for which the burden was not picked up in full. Free swimming is another example: superficially attractive on the surface but, on further examination, not fully funded.
The problem is particularly evident in this year's local government funding settlement, which refers specifically to the availability of free personal care for adults. Free personal care is another concept worthy of debate, but the funding figures are as follows. The estimation is that it will cost £670 million in a full year: £420 million is covered by the area base grant, as set out in the funding settlement, which assumes that the remaining £250 million will be found from local government efficiencies.
What it does not say, however, is that the Government have already increased to 4 per cent. the target for the efficiencies required of local authorities. The Local Government Association has pointed that out to Ministers, so I hope that the Minister responding to the debate will say clearly whether that £250 million is part of the 4 per cent. in efficiency savings being demanded. If it is in addition to those savings, how is that to be achieved?
The document before us is silent on that. If the £250 million is in addition to the 4 per cent. savings, how do the Government reconcile that with their policy on new burdens, which suggests that there should be funding for those new burdens? We need absolute clarity on that. Despite requests since the LGA issued its statement, that clarity has not yet been received.
So, we have seen transfers of burdens across a raft of areas, but that is not the end of the problem with the settlement. I referred half in jest to the nature of the document, and the complication of it. I am glad to say that it is generally accepted that the one person in the country who understands it is in the Chamber, but he is in the Box and cannot talk to us about it. However, it really is that complex and difficult to follow and that creates the real difficulty that there is a growing lack of trust in the local government world and among ordinary residents about the reliability of the criteria on which distribution takes place. One has only to look at some of the figures in the document for individual authorities to see differences that on the face of it are not readily recognisable, or attributable to an evidence base.
Mark Hunter (Cheadle) (LD): Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Robert Neill: I will give way on that point.
Mark Hunter: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has been very generous with his time.
The hon. Gentleman is talking about trust in the Government's figures. Does he agree that part of the problem is that the Government are not delivering to local authorities what their own funding formula indicates that they should? He is quite right to say that anger is building up around the country, and a large part of that is because authorities such as my own in Stockport are being consistently short changed, and are consistently not receiving what the Government's own formula says that they are entitled to. Is it any wonder that there is a complete lack of confidence in the system?
Robert Neill: The hon. Gentleman makes an entirely fair point. I have only to look at the circumstances of my outer-London borough, which has many pockets of deprivation but is on the floor again for the seventh or eighth year running. When we see that fully two thirds of all London boroughs-of any kind-have ended up on the floor, we wonder about the reliability of the calculations that gave rise to that situation.
Although the floor system worked in the past, it has stretched many local authorities to such an extent that the