Dear God....my first day in New Zealand, 19 years old and first time away from home...and I pulled the curtain aside and there was the most revolting, ugly, scary creature I've ever seen! And coming from Australia with our lovely snakes and spiders it's saying something.....it was a Weta. Good choice not to post a picture Sophie...we don't want to give our lovely friends on the forum nightmares forever. They might not be dangerous but you could easily have a heart-attack finding one in a dimly lit room.... We have lots of big lizards including a resident blue-tongue...kookaburras, beautiful Australian native parrots, plenty of spiders (have only seen redbacks a few times and luckily not on the toilet seat AFTER you sit on it! - for those who know the famous song), have only seen one snake in 20 years of living here (thankfully) but down the end of the cul-de-sac they've had a couple of brown snakes (deadly). Maxx seems to wait for the kookaburras to start their morning trill before wanting to get up. When we stay at my sisters beach house down the south coast of NSW we have kangaroos and wallabys hopping past. So nice...I wish we could move there but there isn't any work for us. Where is that lotto ticket....
Sorry, I just had a vision of birds with 'clogs' (shoes from the Netherlands) on. What does clog mean in relation to pigeons? (Please excuse my ignorance!)
Mum and dad are in the country (a couple of hours north of Melbourne) and they get roos, rabbits, snakes and lots of spiders. They've had a red bellied black and a brown on their property, both stuck in the netting that goes over the vines. I chose to live in denial about spiders. They just don't exist at my house. We were camping once and I got up to go to the toilet in the night. When I sat down on the toilet, I looked down to see a white tail running up the inside of my bare leg! I lept up, frantically trying to flick it off my leg before it bit me, while I weeing all over the floor of the bathroom. Not one of my finer moments
Saw some deer and elk this morning! But in my own garden, it’s more like bunnies and dormice, the occasional deer and loads of very pretty birds, my favourites being the hoopoes and the bee catchers. Oh, and we have lots of snakes. I forgot about the snakes! Horseshoe whip snake is the most common, but we’ve seen a couple of Montpelier snakes, too. There are several more venomous ones, but we’ve not been lucky enough to come across them yet!
Of all the animals I encounter in my area the porqupine is the most harmful. The skunk is the most inconvenient. How do you all deal with poisonous creatures ? I couldn’t imagine having to deal with that.
You just grow up with it and are taught never ever walk into the bush without the right footwear nor put your hand under a rock without looking first to see what might be lurking..... I have the same thought about living through snowy, cold winters...I can't imagine how you cope
Case in point, the poor soul http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/austr...enslands-tropical-north/ar-AAw5xGy?ocid=ientp
Do you just kind of assume that every kind of native animal and insect is just trying to kill you? At least that's what I've always heard about Australia! Everyone does that thing where 'that other place' has it worse. Coming from California, I hear a lot of "I don't know how you can live there with the earthquakes!". And that comes from people in the mid-west US or south where hurricanes and tornadoes are a YEARLY threat (multiple times per year sometimes). A really bad earthquake is every 100 years or so. So they think we're nuts and we think they're nuts. Of course CA is totally due for "The Big One"...so they may be right! And what an interesting thread to hear about everyone's local fauna. The weta, @SwampDonkey 's exotic situation, Barney the Bunny...
especially those killer koalas..... No, seriously, if you live in the 'burbs like we do there is a very low chance of getting bitten by something that will kill you.
Rats (that we’ve been relocating with some success) and mosquitoes! And hadedas that squawk very loudly. I hear lots of chirpy birds in the morning but don’t see much of them. And lots of worms in my compost bin. And, if I’m lucky, a dragonfly over the pond.
I just googled the hadeda and then listened to a clip of the squawking They must drive you mad! Are they really "the loudest bird in Africa" like google tells me they are? @SwampDonkey and @Emily_BabbelHund have the best stories, but for completely different reasons lol.
You got the picture right he he. When these pigeons land on the flat roof of our sunroom it sounds like a herd of elephants stampeding over our heads. OK maybe I exaggerate a little, but they are no quiet delicate whisperlight creatures, that' for sure
