Sunbirds living dangerously.

After successfully raising one chick from a nest right outside our louvres, our sunbirds encountered tragedy on their next attempt. Unfortunately on a windy night, their nest blew down and the little chick died of exposure. It was a sad day for all of us. Father sunbird kept coming back to the nest site, calling out for his family. Eventually they built another nest under the neighbour's lean-to. It was a very sensible nest site -- protected from sun and wind and kookaburras who were too large to get through the lattice barrier. 

But now the sunbirds have built a nest outside our bathroom and practically next to the laundry door.

You might remember this post from a couple of weeks ago, where I said that Charlotte, the Bird-eating-spider, was back in her burrow about 30cm from my laundry door. You guessed it...the subird nest is directly above the spider burrow -- about two metres above it and I hope that is enough. One thing is certain. If the baby falls out of the nest it won't die of exposure.

We had another visitor this week. I could hear scratching noises in the back room and it was this gorgeous sand monitor goanna just having a look around. We have at least three of them living nearby. Two boys and a girl, I suspect, after the agressive confrontation I witnessed a couple of months ago. It was all for show and no one got hurt.  This fellow is welcome anytime if he promises to eat spiders. Mind you, he will be just as happy eating baby sunbirds.

Next photo is a slightly less welcome visitor squatter. Geckos...we have dozens of them and with no insect screens they come and go as much as they please. Mostly they don't go. They just stay, but at least they eat some of the bugs which also come and go as much as they please.

Last photo is the little double bar finches who are using our bird bath as a meeting place. One of our friends says he photographed fourteen of them all sharing his birdbath at the same time. They are very amiable little birds.

She is back...

Who?
I'm glad you asked. We think of her as Charlotte after that famous spider character created by E. B. White. She is an Australian Tarantula aka Selenocosmia crassipes aka Barking Spider aka Bird-eating Spider aka Whistling Spider and various other made-up names and she had a burrow about 30cm from my laundry door. I don't have a photo of her because when I tried to get close enough for a photo, it always turned out blurry. It might have had something to do with the uncontrollable shaking of my hands or the fast and heavy pounding of my heart. My camera lens's vibration reduction mode is good, but apparently my hand's vibration creation mode is better when it comes to spiders. If you want a short educational video about these spiders, with close-ups, you should view this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy--xIKJX18

Most nights Charlotte would sit patiently in the opening of her burrow, waiting...waiting...until some unsuspecting lizard, frog, toad, human or anything on her spider menu wandered within pouncing distance. During the day she would snooze contentedly below ground. Life was good for Charlotte and apparently her days and nights had continued in this settled routine for many years. My mother-in-law somehow forgot to mention this fact to us until I was relating the story of her untimely demise. That's right - her demise. I came home from an outing to see that her burrow had been enlarged to such an extent that it was noticeable from the kitchen windows. Horror of horrors! Was she now so huge that she needed a burrow opening of 15 cm or more? No. Our resident goanna, a Lace Monitor, had been looking for a spider-sized snack. Charlotte was no more and the burrow remained unattended, grown over by weeds and collecting dead leaves for weeks.

Unfortunately Charlotte had a secret.  Charlotte was a mother.

Because we live in a regional location we don't have sewerage. Our toilet effluent goes into a septic tank, but our kitchen, laundry, shower and hand basin effluent is simply channelled outside, underground, into the sand. About a week after the 'goanna incident' we had a 'spiders-in-the-hand-basin incident'. Chimera found them first and thought they were half grown Huntsmen Spiders, but a little alarm bell was ringing in my head. Four spiders in the hand basin? Did they follow the leader across the bench? Did they bungie jump together from the ceiling? Or...did they come up through the pipe from below ground? That would explain why there were four at once. Chimera disposed of the spiders for me. I looked up my spider books.

Bizarre fact number 1: Whistling spiders care for their babies for many months until they are big enough to hunt for their own prey. A few days later we had more spiders in the basin. A couple had even escaped and were climbing the walls. Bizarre fact number 2: Whistling spiders are able to climb smooth surfaces, even glass and plastic. This was the stuff of nightmares. Mr Sunshine disposed of them, possibly illegally as they are probably a protected species.

Bizarre fact number 3: Whistling spider burrows can be a metre deep and up to 2 metres long with little underground chambers (pantry and bedrooms) off to the sides. I have news for the writers of the spider books. The pipe from the bathroom basin is over 3 metres from the entry to Charlottes burrow. THREE METRES OF SPIDER TUNNELS AND CHAMBERS. But, I could still sleep at nights because, after number 14, no more little spiders appeared in the bathroom and mother Charlotte had been gobbled up by our goanna, right? Wrong!

Today I discovered that the spider burrow has undergone a transformation - a renovation in fact. The weeds are pushed back, the dead leaves are off to the side and there is new web lining the opening.


Now I think I will go and have a lie down with a valium thick-shake.

Arachnophobiography

I said in a comment in a Mummy McTavish post that I was going to post about this contagious phobia soon. The time has come.
Do you see those sweet little children in the top photo? Of course you do. I'm the big sister on the R.H. side reading the book. I use this photo because it puts me at about the right age and that puts you, dear blog reader, in the picture.

One day I was walking home from school at about the age of seven. As I neared a large vacant block that was still covered in bush, I heard a group of children getting excited about the "ghosts" that resided in among the trees.
Little smarty pants that I was, I informed these superstitious babies that there was no such thing as ghosts and so there certainly wouldn't be any in this little pocket of bushland. (A public library eventually got built there and is still there.)

Naturally the superstitious babies dared me to walk through the trees to prove it. Of course I didn't hesitate. I calmly walked in among the trees for about 15 seconds and then came tearing out, crying and screaming hysterically and covered in cobwebs, like a bat out of hell (great metaphor!). One of these delightfully fat, creepy, scritchy spiders (a garden orb weaver to be exact - see the pic) had spread her web between the trees and as I walked into it, she scuttled for cover and found refuge down the front of my dress and under my singlet (vest to some). This meant that she was crawling around on my bare skin on my chest. This was 48 years ago and I still go tense thinking about it.

Remember the kids who thought that the bush was haunted? My exit must have proved it because they all took off. In seconds they had seemingly evaporated. I was left jumping up and down, pulling at my clothes frantically and screaming my little head off.


To cut this painful story short, a dear, brave lady who was walking on the opposite side of the road came over to console me. As I blubbered out my story she looked down my front. I think she was as scared as I was, but she slapped me soundly on the chest through my dress. Then, from her bag, she pulled out a handkerchief, and reaching down the front of my dress, she courageously scooped the now dead and very squashed spider away in her handkerchief. She then escorted me home still shaking and blubbering. Me, not the lady.

After she had explained what had happened to my dad who was home at the time, he thanked her and said that he thought that I would feel better after a nice bath. Good idea!

Even the bath is still vivid in my memory because as I was sitting shaking in the tub a hair floated by. I started to scream hysterically all over again. Dad rushed in and found me too scared to move to get out of the tub as I sat rigidly and pointed in the water and screamed something about a spider hair. The "spider" hair was about 6 inches long and looked exactly like the hair on my own little head, but by this stage it was difficult to feel rational.
Mummy McTavish knows this story (probably off by heart). I can say with honesty that I have tried not to pass on my fear to my children. I have tried to pass on a love of all nature and I have tried to remain calm and rational in the presence of creepy, skin crawling, horrifying, scary spiders. I can also say that I appear to have failed. Mummy McTavish and Chimera and possibly even Jingles have absorbed my "heightened awareness" (thankyou MMcT for an excellent euphemism) through the womb.

My dad's reaction to all this was: the stupid woman could have caused me to get bitten by smashing the spider against my chest. But she will always be my hero!

Wild-ish Life on the Tablelands

Here are just a some of the delightful wild life we encountered on the tablelands. All the photos are my own so you can tell how close we got to them.
The shy pademelons - not a type of fruit but a nocturnal marsupial a bit less than knee high.

The elusive, also nocturnal, sugar glider. Another marsupial about the size of a small rat, but oh, so much cuter. They have a flap of fur covered skin that stretches between their front and back limbs so that they can leap from tree to tree like a paraglider.

From orb weaver

The golden orb weaver spider. This one would be about the size of a saucer from toe to toe. Their joints are fitted with bright yellow, red or orange knee-pads. If I wasn't an arachnophobe, I might think she was very good looking as spiders go. I use the motto, "Look up and live" when I'm bushwalking because these spiders love to spin their huge webs across paths just above head height and sometimes, not quite above head height. They are not highly poisonous but who wants to get close to one anyway?

The avocado-stealing rifle bird. It's not a great photo, but I didn't want to scare him away and I was trying to get that spectacular glossy plumage. You should see them when they fan out their wings and fluff their feathers to attract a mate. I think it was worth sacrificing one of my precious avocados to even get a bad photo of him.

Last, but not least, I became very attached to this little guy. Very! I had been marvelling that, in spite of all the rain and puddles, we hadn't had any leeches. Not a single one. Then I leaned down to scratch an itch on my shin and sat up with this little fellow attached to my finger. Being the nature loving conservationist that I am, I admired him before giving him to Mr Sunshine who squashed him flat, creating a little bloody patch on the veranda of the tea house where we were relaxing at the time.

Next post might be about the interesting fungi. . . I know, you can hardly wait. Right?