Home Visitors I’ll Never Forget

I live with my husband in a unit complex near a conservation area. We have an array of visitors. Lucky enough to have a big flowering tree in our backyard, we often have an array of birds — rosellas, lorikeets, pigeons, cockatoos, cockatiels, crows, magpies and kookaburras all congregate here. I was having my breakfast by the window one morning and there were seven types of birds having a feeding frenzy in our tree. It was fabulous. Nature at its best!

The crows are cleverer than you might think. They know who’s who, and who likes them and who doesn’t. They knew it was my sister in law who fed them bacon, and me that chased them away from the fence that they love to sit on.

The magpies were frequent visitors to our backyard. Well, I was feeding one. Then two, then they would sing a little song, and more would come for food. Soon they would frequent the garden in droves, expectantly. When I stopped feeding them they got angry. They began taking washing off the line. And our neighbours to the left. The dropped a bra of hers over our side of the fence. And a pair of one of their housemate’s boxer shorts turned up in our garden. I caught the maggies taking pegs off the line to get to my hubbie’s undies. I had always wondered where the odd socks go. Now I’m sure that the maggies have a nest of them somewhere.

They eventually got over not being hand fed.

We live on the Gold Coast in Australia, and it can get quite hot over summer here. And super humid. Around 33 degrees and upwards. So, with the conservation area being so close you may guess what other visitors we often get. Yup. Snakes.

My neighbour Tess pointed out to me one morning that there was a huge carpet python curled up in a corner of our garden. The birds had been going crazy early that morning but I had paid no attention. Now carpet pythons are pretty harmless to humans — so I was relieved that this visor was non-venomous — but still, I didn’t want him taking up residence in my yard, or making his way into the roof. I’d decided it was a he by the way.

Hubbie was not home at the time, so I got my sensible shoes on and dealt with him by calling the complex managers to call me the local snake catcher. A guy came around, clad in shorts and a covid mask, to get rid of this visitor. He held him up and captured him quickly. Slither was released easily back into the wild, where he would live to chase more birds and mice. He was captured with a stick-like snake catching tool and something that resembled a pillow case.

Pretty pleased with myself for organising the roundup of this reptile without erupting into a screaming fit, I was confident I could deal with other intruders as well.

A few months later there was a red belly black snake in between the garden beds of our place and Tess’s. We called for the snake catcher again. This is a poisonous variety. Tess and I waited nervously on each side of the garden bed, watching him closely (yes I’d decided it was a he again). We were chatting and watching and then we both looked up — and he’d gone. Escaped us. We looked in both gardens and the surrounding areas. The snake catcher came but none of us could find him. He was quick, and had outsmarted us this day. The one that got away.

Aha — the food cycle. The birds eat flowers and seed, snakes eat mice (and unfortunately birds). Cats eat birds. Dogs chase cats. We didn’t have any reptilian visitors this summer — I didn’t even see a cane toad luckily. What we have had is an abundance of birdlife. Kookaburras, lorikeets, and parrots have been in our garden again — daily when the tree is in flower. The tree comes alive with red, green, pink, white, black, grey and tweets and squarks of many varieties. I was grateful that this rather large tree made it through the wild weather we had over Christmas. The birdsongs make for a fabulous start to our day.

The best things in life are free.