Of big things like ... Yetis?

 One of the things I love about this part of Australia is that everything is so big. Wonderful things, like large colourful birds, fish that fishermen can write home about, and kangaroos and wallabies that look to me like a kind of large rodent.

There are also annoying things like the bulbous, fat, and persistent flies. The third time I whack my arm and miss them, I remember they won’t be put off by a loud noise or a simple wave of the hand, no matter how “karate kid” fast.

Other insects are also large and sometimes come with teeth and fangs. I have come up close and personal with giant cockroaches, and furry black spiders of joke shop proportions. I have even had a snake enter my house and curl up to sleep in my living room.

So many things have been a surprise, and some are just plain mysterious.

Today I attempted to remove some of the garden weeds. I have been wrestling with an infestation of “Mother-in-Laws tongue. A blade shaped leaf that grows up to four feet high and has spread to plague proportions along our fence.

It fights back.

As I grab one end and pull it out, the other swings around and slaps me on the face, or tangles in my legs and tries to trip me up. Sometimes it succeeds.

Next to the aggressive weeds, there is also a gorgeous large flower that has grown up all on its own. It sprouted from a forgotten and sadly neglected pot in the overgrowth of the sadly neglected garden borders.

That is a big pot and those flowers are almost six inches across.

In Far North Queensland I watched an enormous cassowary cross the road.

Other large things are not as easy to identify. A while ago, I looked out my window and saw what looked like a large hare. It was three times the size of anything I had seen in my whole life. Of course the photo is blurry like the pictures of the loch ness monster or the yeti.

 

As a voracious reader of one too many Readers Digest ‘survival under wildlife attack’ stories, I am understandably nervous about a four foot high rabbit or a haystack of a bird with barbed wire feet.

Are these just bad photos, or the beginning of a new legend? You decide.

Australia is not a bigger New Zealand (Part 1)

I am back in New Zealand for an extended visit and it got me thinking about the surprising ways Australia is very different from New Zealand. I thought Australia was just a larger version of New Zealand. How wrong I was.

This blog post is about some of the differences.

The Wild Life

After two years I never saw a koala in the wild and the only echidna I saw was road kill; but I glimpsed wallabies and kangaroos in their natural element. I saw marvellous Water Dragons ( a very cool looking lizard with bouncy legs and a frill on top), a family of kookaburras, some shy platypuses and whole family of frogs bouncing in the light of my headlights. I went to cairns and saw a crocodile farm and watched a Cassowary cross the road. One day I hope to see the local four foot long Goana and the chunky wombats. I have never seen any of these in New Zealand

The Birds

The birds in Australia are bigger and brasher than their NZ counterparts and come in all the colourful hues I have only seen in NZ cages. They are large and noisy and a whole flock settles in the neighbours garden in the early morning calling each other in raucous and shrill tones. One week I saw about a twenty cockatoos and Galahs feasting on berries in just one tree. I also love the long curved beak Ibis I watched fossicking in amongst the people eating at the Southbank market in Brisbane city.

The Insect Life

Just like the birds, the insects are bigger and bolder. I have been up close and personal with large furry Huntsman Spiders in the house and they can run pretty fast when you are chasing them with a broom. They also make a big mess when you splat them. Mosquitos are familiar but the flies are particularly annoying. In NZ a fly will give up when you swat at it but not in Australia. It just flies off lazily and chooses a new spot to land its little legs on your face. Yuk.

The Bugs

No one told me about the leeches. Twice I went bush walking and had the little black jelly like bloodsuckers crawl up my shoe onto my ankle. They inject anaesthetic and anticoagulant, and then sit there sucking the blood and drop off when they are full. I noticed the first one early but the second left me with a big bloody mark on my sock. At least I never had a tick move in. Those things leave an itchy raised red rash.