Wildlife

Our house is huge, it is actually a bungalow as most Australian houses are due to the amount of space available. It has 4 bedrooms, a double garage, a kitchen, front room, wash room, bathroom and 2 toilets, as well as a garden right round it. There are sliding doors all along one of the sides of the house, straight into the garden. It also backs straight onto the bush, which in some ways is amazing and in others quite frightening! The amazing things being that you can watch parrots and cockatiels and other unknown birds flying past whilst sat in the room or even from the bedroom, the back gate of the garden just opens up into vast amounts of land which will be great for Ben, and there are huge trees and plants everywhere which are quite spectacular to look at from your house! The frightening element of all this is the wildlife, which to be quite frank, we are petrified of. The Australians find this highly amusing, recalling stories of how many snakes they have wrestled from their garden, and only been bitten once…only!! When we cautiously asked whether we were likely to see any where we were living the reply was an enthusiastic ‘oh yes, they’re just hibernating at the moment because it’s winter, but then you’ll see them sure enough’!! Along with the spiders, and a new enemy now discovered known as the cane toad, we are so scared we have a rule that no door or window in the house is to be left open, or indeed with any hint of a gap! How we will manage this when Ben gets here is uncertain as yet! The cane toad was introduced here to eat some insects that were damaging the sugar cane here, (I have read that once they got them here they realised they didn’t eat them anyway because the cane or the insects were the wrong type) since then they have multiplied and are a pest everywhere, conversations about the toads are normally whether a cricket bat, a golf club or putting them in the freezer is the best way to kill them. Anyway, the reason why we fear these ugly creatures is that they can kill a dog if it licks the poison on its back, so Ben is going to have to have another laminated picture card added to his training collection of things not to mess with!