As they do.
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Australia is so weird.
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Or at lest, there weren’t. 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 aren’t much good.
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A friendly wētā, prior to going back outside.
We don’t get the bigger varieties where I live, but feel free to search “giant weta”.
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I’m good, thanks
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It’s a good job they are friendly…!
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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 “friendly” I mostly just meant “not aggressive / nothing to worry about”. They do look a bit freaky when you first meet them, but I usually find that once you know something isn’t 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 :) My only concern was getting it into the container without damaging its antennae – those things are huge :)
This one is female – the big ‘spike’ at the back is an ovipositor, where her eggs come out.
They’re 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 that’s where it ended up climbing to.
Wētā are pretty cool. Apparently there are about 100 different species here. NZ does have some unusual wildlife – 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 – often on offshore islands – where conservation workers put in huge efforts to eliminate the predators and hopefully enable various surviving species to continue surviving.
And I’m only now learning that I need to macronise “wētā”, because the macron-less word is an entirely different word in Māori, along much the same lines as the Mazda MR2, as recently mentioned in a different thread…
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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.
They’re all sorts of them, and they’re all pretty cheap these days, especially if you don’t need the fanciest features. If you’re parents are comfortable (or could be trained to be) with using a memory card, they’re all pretty straightforward, I think.
I think my brother’s 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 “this is a snake”. 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 “Eastern blue-tongued lizard” with a link to a Siri look-up.
Which is impressive and all, but I’m sure it means that the phone is sending all my phones to a serve somewhere. I’d better be careful with any nudes or sex tapes.
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“Naked blue-tongued lizards in your area…”
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We have hedgehogs visiting our garden. We put food down for them - initially just in a feeding dish - but it was often consumed by local cats and/or foxes before the hedgehogs got to it. We fashioned a simple tunnel which made it harder for the larger aninals, but they were often able to squeeze far enough in to grab the dish - or push it out the other side, so we acquired a “proper” hedgehog feeding station - small doorways and interior baffles - which worked fine, until this inquisitive cub decided to explore.
I now keep expecting to find a trapped foxcub in there when he gets just a bit too large to get back out…
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That’s lovely. We typically see one or two hedgehogs a year in our garden. We’ve been putting water out for them and any other wildlife that visits. We considered putting food out, but I was concerned about attracting other animals. This year we chose plants for our garden based on what the internet told us hedgehogs like, which seems to be highly scented plants, presumably to attract insects for them to feed on.
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I had an unusual garden visitor today: a hummingbird hawk moth
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