Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
Just before the weather began to turn cooler, a stranger came flapping through the garden. It was large enough that you could expect to hear the wings beating. I spent some fruitless hours looking at pictures of Delia butterflies, since the last impressive butterfly I saw was an Imperial Jezebel (Delias harpalyce) in a neighbour's... Continue Reading →
The spy camera team arrived yesterday, armed with a big blue plastic crate full of gadgets, plus a couple of star pickets and a mallet. While the wildlife wasn't looking, Corin, Steve and Andrew set up three cameras in plausible places for passing four-legged traffic. Or wriggling snake traffic. Or winged traffic. I had hoped... Continue Reading →
I now have a wonderful kit that will tell me what's in the water that flows past our house. Finally, we have some way to tell what's going on underwater, other than just admiring clear water rippling over rocks. Or staring at turbid brown floodwater, with the occasional tree or wombat carcass floating by, while hoping... Continue Reading →
We regularly see mistletoebirds (Dicaeum Hirundinaceum) around the house and around the hills. They're a flowerpecker with a taste for mistletoes. Mistletoes grow all over the world, not just at Christmas for romantic kissing purposes. Unlike the area north of us, near Lake Burrinjuck, however, our eucalypts have few mistletoes. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're... Continue Reading →
Mum and I were having a walk around the garden checking out all the growing things when we passed the callistemon bush that grows on the edge of the lookout. I'd been seeing the flowers from a distance but it wasn't until we were up close that I realized it was amazingly alive with insects... Continue Reading →
For the third time in three years, many of our trees are looking like ghosts of their former selves. The immediate, obvious, culprit is the Christmas Beetle (an anoplagnathus species of scarab), a bit of seasonal joy in a shiny suit. If the weather's right, it digs its way up from underground in November or December,... Continue Reading →
The Murrumbidgee River is a significant part of our landscape here. But it's only in the summer that we really get to play with it. Charles and his cousins Will and Alex had intended to go out in our old Canadian canoe. I was doubtful it would hold three large young men. However, it filled... Continue Reading →
Fresh, juicy, aromatic apricots are one of the joys of Christmas time in Australia. So I was horrified to see that criminals were in the garden stealing our treasures. I ran out shrieking swear words at them. Of course they think shrieking is just talking endearments in their own squawking language, but the running... Continue Reading →
A big attraction of setting up the "small bird stepping stone" plantations on Esdale this year (five 20m x 20m areas that link the Mullion Creek vegetation to the Murrumbidgee) was the promised monitoring of the plants and animals. I'm really interested to see what the changes will be as the trees and shrubs grow.... Continue Reading →
The most common way I see snakes around here is on the road. Sometimes alive. Sometimes dead, if they've been unlucky enough to meet with a car. On the cool, windy- but-sunny days we've been having lately, I've seen them quite frequently, probably because they're too slow to be gone before I get there. They probably... Continue Reading →
Weevils are cute. No, really. Beetles tend to be sturdy and a little alien, flies have those weird multifaceted eyes, but weevils are like the Disney version of an insect, with big eyes and a long ant-eaterish nose. We were out chopping and spraying weeds in a revegetation area when I noticed that many of the... Continue Reading →
It sounds like another fairy story, to have dragons at the bottom of the garden. We have two types, the Bearded Dragons and the Water Dragons. As a child I was always convinced that the water dragons were tiger snakes. Usually all we saw of them in the river was the long striped tail disappearing... Continue Reading →
We saw our first snake of the season a few days ago. The dogs had been barking at the bottom of the steps near the laundry where there's a drainage hole in the wall. I saw a skinny black tail disappearing. Uh oh. Red bellied black. It wasn't a big one, probably around half... Continue Reading →
Have you seen this bird? It turns out that nobody knows much about Gang-Gangs, even though they're an iconic bird for this region. It's not really clear what they feed on, or where they nest, if their numbers are declining or if they've moved out of town. Most of the recent sightings have been in introduced... Continue Reading →
I've discovered the secret life of worms. After the wind and rain last week, I noticed lots of leaves lying around on the concrete outside my bedroom door. Except that Calypso the puppy seemed unusually interested in eating them. She eats anything her mouth can reach, but not usually leaves. Then I realized that the... Continue Reading →
Not so long ago I woke up to the sound of the dogs barking frantically at an echidna. They seem to take something about the way a spiny anteater moves as an affront to reality. The little heaves among the sharp spines it makes as each leg moves forward are an insult, as is the... Continue Reading →
One Bend In The River 