Wild BNE

Of all the animals I thought I might see today during my first visit to Pooh Corner Bushland Reserve, a dingo wasn’t one of them!  I had just passed a woman walking with two offleash dogs when I saw a third dog following at a distance behind them. Only, the dog ran off the track and into the bush when it saw me, and I realised it was a wild animal! It was wary without being particularly afraid; it never took its eyes off me, but it also seemed fairly content to stay put in the dry grass just twenty-five to thirty metres away. Wacol is famous for its abundant eastern grey kangaroo population, some of which I saw today on the fields surrounding the nearby jail. Perhaps the lure of prey and access to water during these dry times has lured this creature down from the nearby ranges, where dingos are known to occur according to the Queensland Museum. Although most likely not a purebred individual, I believe there is a lot of dingo in this animal’s genetic make-up regardless, and this als...

I had a great day searching for insects in Daisy Hill Conservation Park today. I found some rare and unusual critters too. The most visually spectacular of them all was a beetle from the Rhipiphoridae family, which are also known as wedge-shaped beetles. The one I found was a male, as told by his extravagant antennae, and he was perched at the tip of a small wattle. Rhipiphorids have a surprising lifecycle for a beetle, with their grubs being internal parasitoids of other insects, including other beetles. The strangest of all the insects I found was actually one that found me! I was standing at the track edge on the Buhot Creek Circuit examining something that I can’t quite remember now, when I felt a fly land on my leg. When I looked down, I saw a fly like no other I had seen before. It had a flattened shape with a strange, hawk-like face, complete with hooked mouthparts, and I didn’t trust its intentions! I tried to shake it off, but it kept landing back on my leg repeatedly, and I r...

New housing developments are strange places. They feel like the scene of a disaster that unfolded just moments before you got there. You have to look past the new houses and clean cul-de-sacs, the fresh paint on the streetlamps. Start with the trees. See the lone survivor from the forest now no more? Exposed and alone, the wind blows it out of shape. See the native flower, in amongst the grass? A natural relic from an obliterated habitat. But these are not lifeless places—quite the opposite, in fact. There are all sorts of creatures wandering about, homeless trauma victims suddenly finding themselves on the edge of survival. It might be a koala up a power pole, where months earlier stood a red gum. It might be a brolga named Bruce , who wanders a floodplain now paved. Some animals do alright at first, like the kangaroos that are gifted with fresh lawns to graze, or the rainbow bee-eaters that enjoy the open space. It’s only later that their fortunes fade, when the landscape is given ov...

Today I woke to the sound of a butcherbird duet, a sign of life on an otherwise cold and still winter’s morning. Thinking they would make a good photography subject, I decided to see if I could follow my ears to track them down. Emerging onto the street outside my apartment block, I realised the singing was echoing off the tall buildings around me and that try as I might, I couldn’t quite pinpoint the direction it was coming from. In my room, I had felt like the sounds were coming from the direction of the main road, so I headed that way. The song was that of the pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) specifically, a beautiful, full-bodied fluting sound, rich in melody and sung by the male and female together . At the main road, however, there were already cars passing by, and it made it hard to hear the still somewhat distant birds. After wandering a few blocks fruitlessly, I ended up walking away from the main road, towards houses and parkland. There, at the top of a Norfolk pine...

Near the edge of bushland in Coopers Plains one night last week, I found a lovely, shy pale-backed orbweaver (Araneus albidus) in a bloodwood tree. It had a beautifully constructed retreat inside the curled-up but living leaves of the tree. Adjacent to this dwelling was its prey capture web, a small, well-made orb amongst the foliage. I imagine that when the bloodwood flowers profusely (and it’s always profusely when it comes to bloodwoods), the web must offer a huge bounty of nectivorous insects as food. To my eye, this spider is virtually indistinguishable from another orb-weaver, the leaf-curling Araneus dimidiatus . That spider, however, only ever seems to use a dead leaf as its retreat, unlike A. albidus. Reading various resources about these two spiders confirms this observation, and it appears to be the easiest way to tell them apart. On the finer branch ends of many shrubs in the bushland were messy webs with tiny spiders in them. They all had a similar hunched shape, and when...