One thing I can say about Australia is that you sure hear some different sounds here than you hear in the United States! it takes a bit of getting used to!!! One of the noisiest things are the parrots and cockatoos which are everywhere!! This guy was eating in our back yard and had a friend who flew off before I could get the picture taken but he was NOISY!!!!! There are always screeches and other strange noises during the day but then at night—-there are more eerie sounds like the ones that wake you up from a dead sleep and you say “what the heck was that?” and “I hope it doesn’t come in the house!”. One of the other wild sounding birds is the curlew which is out a lot at low tide and has what the bird book describes as a “haunting , sometimes grating tone” which I would agree is pretty accurate in describing the sound! The biologists in my family would love identifying all this stuff for me but to be quite honest sometimes it freaks me out when I hear stuff at night!!! I admit it—I am a wimp when it comes to some of this nature stuff. Still waiting for the snake adventure which I have no doubt will come but hopefully I can wait awhile for that! We have our share of little lizardy like things that have crept in under the door but I can handle those guys–just chase ’em back out with a broom but haven’t found any of the big goannas yet —what the Australians call monitor lizards. They originally thought that they were iguanas–hence the name. So that is your nature lesson for today……more to come!
September 9, 2008
