Not wild about wildlife

During our first summers in the Northern Beaches, you could see the grass growing. At our first house in Mona Vale the lawn mowing chap had to come close to weekly.

We also had bandicoots – lots of them – until suddenly they seem to have gone on holiday which was quite a relief as their holes in the grass were a danger. At the Mona Vale house we had a pet spider, a St Andrews Cross spider (Argiope keyserlingi) which is quite spectacular looking and makes zigzag patterns on its web while hanging on with four times two pair of legs. My eldest grandson and I adopted him (or possibly her) when we saw his – or her – fascinating web and called him Spidey Horace. Unfortunately, the pest control man, called because of red-backed spiders, didn't have the option of leaving Horace alone while massacring the rest so we think Spidey may have gone to his (or her) eternal rest. But curiously at our new house on Bilgola Plateau, Spidey Horace’s cousin Spidey Harris created his web just outside my bedroom window and only went to his eternal rest after a very windy storm.

Now in autumn, the cicadas have had their day but at their noisiest they reminded me of my North Shore childhood when we collected discarded cicada shells; I vaguely remember one was called a Black Prince.

Other insects, however, still think it’s summer.

This morning I found large ants doing backstroke in my water glass and small ants colonising my grandson's sticky-topped desk. At the Mona Vale house we had carpenter ants in such abundance that one wondered how long it would be before they demolished a wall.

And the only fly in the ointment when living on the Northern Beaches – flies – are still homing in on our kitchen regularly to taste test the cooking.

Growing up on the verdant North Shore, I became used to wildlife although nothing made me like it.

I remember very, very large “tarantulas” as we called them – hairy and harmless garden spiders which nonetheless provoked me to scream – and a fat and repulsive blue-tongued lizard which lived in the shrubbery. The first time I saw it I also screamed – the go-to response for scary wildlife – and ran into the house, refusing to go back to the garden for days.

Unfortunately our current house appears to be a paradise for Daddy Long Legs spiders (surely that’s not their proper name) and when it is raining or even threatening to rain we get the occasional Huntsman which, as I wrote above, growing up on the North Shore we called Tarantulas. No matter how much I tell myself these spiders are harmless, I just wish they’d go away.

Our Bilgola Plateau house is blessed with a huge gum tree outside the porch which attracts sulphur-crested cockatoos, magpies, kookaburras and occasionally rainbow lorikeets. We provide seeds but only the cockatoos seem brave enough to try. And as we can’t tell one bird from another all the cockatoos are now called Fred.

 

 

Guote for the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: 

Hollywood executive, allegedly, on Fred Astaire’s first screen test: “Can’t act, can’t sing, slightly bald. Can dance a little.”