Slithering snake

Just the other day I was telling a friend about the wildlife in Australia. We talked about possums (noisy critters), Tasmanian Devils (nasty critters), dingos (killer critters), koalas (you wouldn't want to meet a male koala in a dark bush alley), and basically came to the conclusion that almost all Australia critters are deadly.

This little green tree snake however is not deadly I'm by no means a fan of snakes, and have luckily only come across one or two in the wild, this being one of them. In a nature reserve not far from my house, the ocean and a creek are divided by a beautiful headland, which has a lush canopy that lowers the temperature down a few degrees...a welcome respite in the Australian summer. There is plenty of wildlife hiding in the headland, and when I took a friend there one Christmas we spotted scrub turkeys, kookaburras and lizards. And this snake. I was heading towards this hand rail, to look over and enjoy the view below, but luckily my brother spotted the little snake (he wouldn't have been a metre a length) slowly slithering its way along the wood.

I snapped this photo (using a moderate zoom) and he quietly went on his wriggling way into the wilderness.

Babushka Roos

Being Australian, I tend to forget just how odd some of our native animals are. In the past couple of weeks I've been asked twice what a marsupial is - the best example being a kangaroo - with the answer being an animal that raises its young in a pouch. I grew up not far from a wildlife reserve where you could buy bags of puffed oats to feed the kangaroos. This was always the highlight of any trip to the sanctuary, to try to get up close to the joeys without angering the mothers. When I lived in Canberra, early morning drives to the airport were met with trepidation, as kangaroos could hop across the road at any given moment. A kangaroo hitting your windscreen would cause about the same level of damage as a small deer or elk for those northern hemispherites reading.

I've never been a huge camper, but did go to a few lovely campsites in recent years and had up close and personal views of other native fauna including goannas and wombats. At Merry Beach in New South Wales, there were lots of kangaroos hanging around the camp grounds and this family of three arranged themselves like a Babushka doll near the tent, which was a nice surprise to zip open the tent to find.