The brow cuckoo-dove ( also known as the Slender-billed Cuckoo-Dove ) use to turn up from time to time but since installing the bird feeder out the back it’s one of the most common birds in the backyard! The species is found up the entire east coast and across Papua New Guinea and into Indonesia. Their specific habitat is rainforests and wet sclerophyll forest, particularly at the forest edges, along creeks and rivers. They are also found in regrowth areas and cleared land.
Brown Cuckoo-Dove waiting for his turn at the bird feeder
My wife found this snake under a house brick while gardening in the back yard. My 5 year old daughter identified it as a white crowned snake after reading a snake book that our neighbors had given her a few weeks earlier She was pretty damn close! After more consultation with the book we were confident this is actually a golden crowned snake. The crown marking on it’s head is quite distinctive, unlike the white crowned snake the golden crowned’s crown has a gap at the back of the head near the neck.
It’s quite small, it would have been about 30cm long and about 1cm thick in the body just behind the head. It hung around for a few minutes after it was disturbed then calmly slithered away to hide under a nearby wood pile. We don’t often see snakes near the house, we were happy to have seen it, and it was great to be able to identify it too.
Found in the backyard while gardening. Jessie identified it from a snake book the neighbors gave her! They are venomous but not considered dangerous to people.
Golden crowned snakes are found along much of the east coast of Australia from Queensland to NSW. They are not large growing to a maximum length of 75cm. Although they are venomous they are not considered dangerous to people, they are nocturnal and feed mostly on small lizards, frogs and blind snakes.
A few days ago a pair of Kookaburras started attacking an old steel air conditioner on the side of the house. They sit on a branch and take turns flying right at the thing, hitting it hard with their beaks. It makes a loud clang, sometimes they get their beaks stuck between the slats.
These are the 2 kookaburras that have been attacking the side of the house for the past few days. Don’t know why they’re doing it. They’re hitting an old steel air conditioner really hard with their beaks, sometimes their beaks get stuck between the slats
It’s not happened before in the 3 years we’ve been here. Not sure what it going on, I thought there might be something living inside the aircon box that they’re going after, or maybe they’re just sharpening their beaks? They tend to do it at the crack of dawn which is 5am this time of year.
Others have seen this behavior, there are a numberofpeople having problems with Kookaburras repeatedly trying to attack their reflection in windows too.
I’ve been shining a bright light at them, it makes them fly away, they sometimes come back after a while though. Any other suggestions welcome!
These two have been attacking an old air conditioner on the side of our house for the past few days, they take it in turns!
Jess spotted this huge moth on the rock ledge out the back one evening. It was just sitting there slowly beating it’s wings. It didn’t look injured, I wondered if it had recently emerged from it cocoon and was drying or stretching it’s wings.
Check out the match stick for some scale, it’s body was just monstrous.
I’ve been trying to work out what species this is. CSIRO’s what bug it that site looks comprehensive, but it is soooo slooow it’s excruciating. I’d usually click about quickly and explore but it takes over a full minute for a page to load, the site is unusable.
Google has a fantastic new image search feature where you can give it a picture and have it return similar pictures from all over the web. To use it go to Google Image Search, and drag a picture onto the search box. I tried it out with one of the moth pictures, it returned a bunch of images of similar colour and shape, but none of them were moths 🙁 You can also type in a search word next to the picture, I tried “moth”, bingo! The pictures that came back were of somthing called the Polyphemus Moth. It looked close but not quite the same, a quick lookup on Wikipedia showed it was only found in Central and North America, damn. The article also said it’s a member of the Saturniidae family.
Now that I had an idea what to look for I went back to the CSIRO site and found a link to a Saturniidae page! The pictures there still weren’t a great match though. A narrower search on Google for “saturniidae australia” brought up some much more promising links. The closest I’ve found is Opodiphthera helena, commonly called the “Helena Gum Moth” or the “Helena Emperor Moth”
It matches on looks and location. I think this is it! Woohoo, the Internet does it again!
This is one monster moth, check the size of it's body.Helena Emperor Moth. It was sitting there calmly beating it's wings.
