As they do.
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Australia is so weird.
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Or at lest, there werenât. But this morning I noticed that a pair of brightly-coloured parrots in my Grevillea hedge had red heads, not blue. Looking closely saw the white cheek-patches and black-and-lime backs of Eastern rosellas.
I tried to photograph them through my study window, but the photos arenât much good.
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A friendly wÄtÄ, prior to going back outside.
We donât get the bigger varieties where I live, but feel free to search âgiant wetaâ.
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Iâm good, thanks
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Itâs a good job they are friendlyâŚ!
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More indifferent than friendly, in my experience. Apparently they can bite, but you really need to be bothering them.
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Yeah, by âfriendlyâ I mostly just meant ânot aggressive / nothing to worry aboutâ. They do look a bit freaky when you first meet them, but I usually find that once you know something isnât going to act scary, it stops looking scary too. This one was randomly hanging out on my fridge door which did startle me, but only until I saw what it was :â) My only concern was getting it into the container without damaging its antennae â those things are huge :â)
This one is female â the big âspikeâ at the back is an ovipositor, where her eggs come out.
Theyâre not prone to coming indoors in my experience (I can only recall that happening to me on one other occasion), but maybe we unwittingly carried it in on something, and thatâs where it ended up climbing to.
WÄtÄ are pretty cool. Apparently there are about 100 different species here. NZ does have some unusual wildlife â other than bats there were no mammals here for the longest time, so other things filled out the ecosystem. (Most famously, this is why we have so many different species of flightless birds.) Inevitably lots of populations were absolutely devastated or entirely wiped out when people introduced the predators we have now, so there are a number of protected reserves â often on offshore islands â where conservation workers put in huge efforts to eliminate the predators and hopefully enable various surviving species to continue surviving.
And Iâm only now learning that I need to macronise âwÄtÄâ, because the macron-less word is an entirely different word in MÄori, along much the same lines as the Mazda MR2, as recently mentioned in a different threadâŚ
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Does anyone have any recommendations for bird-box cameras or trail cameras?
Was tempted to fashion one myself but there figured there must be off-the-shelf options that are a bit more parent friendly.
Theyâre all sorts of them, and theyâre all pretty cheap these days, especially if you donât need the fanciest features. If youâre parents are comfortable (or could be trained to be) with using a memory card, theyâre all pretty straightforward, I think.
I think my brotherâs are bushnells. They;re pretty fancy (or were three or four years ago when he got them) with the ability to send picturs over cellular.
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This morning my sister called me urgently into the garden to tell her whether âthis is a snakeâ. And although the thing in question did look rather like a death adder, ir was rather a half-grown and perfectly innocuous blue-tongued lizard. I took a photograph for your amusement:
and was rather surprised to discover that my phone app had automatically picked out the subject from the clutter, recognised it from some sort of image search, and saved a correct identification âEastern blue-tongued lizardâ with a link to a Siri look-up.
Which is impressive and all, but Iâm sure it means that the phone is sending all my phones to a serve somewhere. Iâd better be careful with any nudes or sex tapes.
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âNaked blue-tongued lizards in your areaâŚâ
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