When Leanne Wicks swapped the city suburbs for a patch of country, her first friend was a curious and cheeky king parrot.
The artist's imagination unfurled with the abundance of native bird life on a rural property near Kandos, in the NSW Capertee Valley, when she moved from Sydney in 2002.
"The king parrot came to visit ... they're very inquisitive, he'd tap on my window and spread his tail and wings," Wicks tells AAP.
"I used to go for walks and he'd follow me and I thought, 'These are sentient beings and I'm having a relationship with this bird'."
Wicks wanted to remember the connection to her feathered friend, resplendent in silky red and green, so she turned to her life-long hobby of knitting to honour him.
After online patterns failed her, Wicks drew up her own and knitted a king parrot sculpture to scale.
The calming hobby soon turned into something of a calling, as she set out to photograph and knit as many species as possible - with absolute anatomical accuracy.
"The guidebooks do not have bird bums in them, so my camera card is full of bird bums," Wicks said, with a laugh.
"I'm doing a 3D soft sculpture, so I need to see more than just the fancy view."
She has since stitched more than 100 birds, including galahs, brush turkeys, gouldian finches, sulphur-crested cockatoos, ibis, rainbow lorikeets and kookaburras.
Her work is more than a twitchers' treat.
The collection, brought together under Songlark Studio and exhibited across the central west, is a way to pay respects to First Nations people and decolonise her mind.
Wicks, who is married to a Dabee woman, researched her family history and was dismayed to find one of her forebears killed native birds for a museum collection.
"I thought: I'm here now and I can connect with Aboriginal people," she said.
"Starting to learn more and not from the white point of view ... (it's) to pay the rent, help out and try to be a good ally."
Conservation is also a focus as Wicks knits her flock.
The Capertee Valley is a key conservation area and one of the last remaining habitats for the critically endangered regent honeyeater.
With only 350 of the birds believed to be left in the wild, Wicks was thrilled to spot one in her backyard in late 2024.
"I don't think I breathed," she said of the sighting.
"I went outside to chase some photos of yellow tail black cockatoos and they disappeared.
"I thought they called me out for nothing, but then I saw a little silhouette in a tree."
Conservationists confirmed her observation and told her it had likely been nesting within a kilometre of her home.
So, of course, she had to knit one.
"I just love the joy in people's faces when they see them."
