Bushwalk Australia

It was the first time I'd seen both parents, there had only been the male and the two young ones previously.
Photo isn't great as it was overcast, 1600iso and a lens full of fungi isn't great for sharpness.

Another one turned up today and a White Winged Chough.

With all this rain...a rather soggy Butcherbird.

Lovely weather for some.

Had a good laugh...

I had no idea that racoons were native Australian animals. Where are they found ?
I saw this last night on my fence :

with at least another 4 was having a great time racing about.

Removing some arum lilies around the side of the house…. They keep self-propagating

Found this handsome fella, I’ve left some lilies and a water dish for the time being. We are currently isolating, if I can find him again post-iso I’ll move him to the river. Once our yard dries up in a month or so it won’t be a great environment. Not to mention the Jack Russell .

Seen near my backdoor during intermittent showers 2 weeks ago. I'm hoping he is eating the snails.

I was moving some old building materials yesterday and disturbed a gecko.
So today I got some old and broken tiles and made a gecko habitat to hang on the fence. Fence faces the setting sun so even in winter it should warm up enough to allow warming up to hunting temperature

This Brown Dove joined me on my verandah for mornings tea this morning. They are fearless birds.

GregG wrote:This Brown Dove joined me on my verandah for mornings tea this morning. They are fearless birds.

Nice, looks like a male brown cuckoo-dove Greg.
No photos but we've been getting heaps of Noisy Friarbirds lately. More than ever before.
Much commotion but very entertaining.

Neighbour photographed an echidna under the fence in my suburban backyard.

Lovely slimline Green Tree Snake, about a metre long, doing the rounds in my garden at the moment...lotsa rain, lotsa green growth & lotsa croaking frogs. Ideal conditions for a roaming green snake.

Eremophila wrote:Removing some arum lilies around the side of the house…. They keep self-propagating

Found this handsome fella, I’ve left some lilies and a water dish for the time being. We are currently isolating, if I can find him again post-iso I’ll move him to the river. Once our yard dries up in a month or so it won’t be a great environment. Not to mention the Jack Russell .

Froggie is still in residence, despite that part of the yard being bone dry and I would have thought not very appealing to an amphibian.

I’ve refilled the big water dish - a large pot plant saucer - and partly covered one side so he’s not exposed to the hungry birds while bathing.

Stumpy the blue-tongue (see earlier photo) has taken up residence in a drain sump in the backyard. Comes out to sun late in the afternoon.

Resident blue-tongue - who is either very, very fat or a heavily pregnant female - laying claim to the water bowl. Lovely colouration, too.

At the neighbours' place is close enough.\


That Blue Tongue pic is great!

New frog call in the garden tonight...
Headtorch on red tint, my 9yo son gradually narrowed down the area to head high grapefruit tree branch....with a lovely green Graceful Tree Frog nestled in the fork.

Hopefully he attracts a few more companions over the next few nights.

An assortment.

These turbo-chicks must be fairly recently hatched. Their the smallest I've seen so far.

This photo is taken from my couch, looking out the window. (Yes, I do need to mow the dandelions.)



EDIT:

Huh, and just the next day taken from the same spot on my couch, looking out the same window...

I hope it doesn't dig a hole in the new grass that I've just sewn there!

Nice! Turbo chooks one day and echidna the next. I think I'd put up with the digging to have an echidna visit .

This guy has been living in my garden for several weeks. Today he was sunning himself on my orange tree. I managed to get a photo before it disappeared into the rocks out the front of the house.

We have semi-resident red neck wallabies, bandicoots, echidna, on rare occasions a koala might show up (not in recent years sadly). Various snakes, mostly brown snakes, red belly blacks, death adders, grass snakes. Big fat blue tongue lizards and spiny scale skinks. Of the birds, the most interesting we have is a visiting mob of satin bower birds (males and females - a couple of years ago one built a bower in one part of the garden but our dog at the time kept blundering through it, so Mr Bowerbird got miffed and moved on), black cockatoos come and visit the she-oaks when they are covered in nuts/seed pods. We have several families of fairy wrens around our property, lots of finches, parrots, cockatoos, tiny honey eaters.

The aftermath of a war.

One way that native Sugarbag bees expand is to try and take over an existing hive. This results in what's called a fighting swarm. The attackers and the defenders fight it out and the strongest group wins. The defenders grab onto the attackers with their jaws and don't let go, this results in the death of both bees. There is not much you can do about it and you just have to let them fight it out.

Following photo shows a section of the carnage around the front of my hive. Those black dots are pairs of dead bees.