The Eclectic Interweb

Outdoor wildlife is a little more diverse than indoor… thankfully. We still get the usual cockroaches, large and small hiding in the leaf litter but as they don’t do anything except annoy (and occasionally try to come indoors) I tend to leave them be. Likewise the flies are pretty much left to their own devices as long as they leave *me* alone… which they don’t… which of course is where that all goes wrong.

As I said in a previous post, we rarely spray insecticides on anything unless forced to by circumstance and the result is that the garden, small as it is is, is alive with interesting insects, arachnids and other animals.

We have tiny skinks that vary in size from 2 – 3 cms, to 10 – 12 cms… the cat likes to chase those! We had a blue tongued skink here a little while ago but it vanished. We have the usual crop of snails, some small slugs, a couple of frogs that spend all night doing their best to keep us awake.

Birds are around in numbers as well even though the Indian Mynah seems to be displacing the natives more and more. Since I stopped feeding them we rarely see as many Galah’s or Sulphur Crested Cockatoos as we used to, nor do we see the Rosella’s etc. In fact, the only parrots we see regularly these days are the small ‘grass parrots’. On the other hand, the food was attracting cockroaches so had to go. We still get the huge ‘magpie’ (nothing like the UK variety by the way) and have Noisy Miners, but apart from them and the honey eaters that’s all we see regularly.

Spiders we have in abundance. The most obvious of these are the Garden Orb which builds massive webs (1½ metres or more in diameter) made of very strong silk and are a nightmare to walk into… especially at night!! 🙂 We have one of these spiders just outside the front door and she’s the largest one of its kind I’ve ever seen. She has a 2 cm wide body… but I’m not game enough to go close enough to measure the span of her legs !! While there are many others of the same species in the garden… this one must be queen. She’s huge!

We also have  St Andrews Cross spiders and a variety of smaller less well known varieties… including the Redback which is everywhere and poisonous. Luckily they prefer to keep to places we don’t poke around in too often so we’ve been ok til now. Also luckily, so far anyway, we’ve got no female funnel web spiders well as far as we can tell we don’t have any, so are unlikely to have any wandering males going courting in the near future… we hope. The female tends to stay in her burrow, its the male who is the dangerous one of the pair – as you might expect should be the case? 🙂

As for the rest… millipedes, centipedes, slaters, shield bugs and an assortment of visiting moths and butterflies make this a nice time of year to be out in what little space we have and sort of makes me yearn for a larger area to ‘own’ and/or make into a ‘preserve’. It’d be a shame if the local populations of small life was to disappear entirely. I like diversity me!! 🙂