Down under for some meetings this week and next week, and spring has sprung…
In Western Australia the winds are blowing off the land to the water, reversing the normal wind patterns, and with that comes ALL the damn flies from WA’s cattle country… Annoying would be a ‘polite’ way to state it…
And apparently it’s because WA has the ‘wrong’ type of Dung Beetle… They are planning to import the ‘correct’ type of Dung Beetle next year. It has to do with life cycle and hatching, etc… I won’t bore you with the 20 minute lecture I got from the scientist (I ‘know’ better than to ask questions like that… sigh). Apparently the ‘new’ beetles will hatch earlier, break up the cowpies and eat the fly’s larvae before they hatch…
And then there is the ‘other’ little minor annoyance…
Came out of one of the meetings yesterday afternoon and started to go out the door to the car, only to be stopped and the individual pointed to the fence. Wrapped around the locking mechanism was a Carpet Python, and he said the Game Warden was on the way, but it would be a few minutes…
So out the OTHER door and around the entire building to get to the parking lot. And I was truly thankful that sucker wasn’t there when I came through that gate earlier, as it is a blind reach in through a hole in the panel to unlock the gate from the outside…
And the WA police are ‘death’ on speeders; don’t know if this is the norm or just an enforcement push, but I was glad that the rent-a-wreck had cruise control!!!
How charming.
Well, the pythons are all non-venomous. The poster you included should have shown a Brown Snake, which is common and very venomous. The Tiger Snake, of course, is one of the more venomous of Oz’s snakes.
Hope importing the bugs works out better for them than importing rabbits did. A bettle-proof fence would probably be more expensive and even less effective than the rabbit-proof fence.
Well, at least your personal BOK now includes some knowledge of the life cycle of flies. That can come in handy if you need to bore a boor. For example, a fellow passenger.
JD(ntowtp) that was exactly my thought. Actually, I guess I should do a post on the rabbit proof fence – they’re rebuilding it in places, not to keep rabbits out (that is a lost cause) but to keep wild dogs at bay.
I would have taken a photo of the new fence when I was up that way two weeks ago, however there’s a $2000 fine for driving near it 🙁
Anything but snakes !!
Ahhh….. Australia….
Where damn near every critter will kill you stone dead in the most horrible of ways just because it’s Tuesday. And the cutest and least lethal of the native fauna is a cranky addict.
Watch out for drop bears.
BGM
Australia has some of the deadliest spiders and snakes in the world. If I lived there I would walk around in hip waders.
Sounds like the wild west.
Sounds like you’re having fun, dammit!
LL- Oh yeah…
Robert- Apparently there are no Browns on the island… The Tigers have killed em all…
JD- Snerk… Point!
WSF- True, but ONLY if I could remember all the Latin terms she used…
Julie- Please do, I don’t think ‘we’ understand what y’all are going through!
Woody- It’s spiders for me!
BGM- True!
CP- You DO pay attention to where you’re stepping… 😀
Opus- Nah, that’s Darwin and that area up there! 🙂
Brighid- Moments of fun, HOURS of boredom and meetings!
Hey Old NFO;
Just watch where you step…and don’t bring back any “hitchhikers” back, hehehe
then make the moments count…
Could be worse, it could be a MOUSE! 😉
I’ve found most of my fellow Australians to be rather blasé about snakes – except Tiger snakes.
Those are aggressive, and will actually chase you.
I remember the snake chain at each external door of the house in which I grew up – four feet of heavy chain on a short handle. Used properly (like a flail), the chain conforms to the ground, and chops a snake in half with no chance of missing. That’s much better odds than using a shovel or a shotgun.
Don’t buy that fly cure bull. I spend time with friends around Melbourne and Sydney and even without cattle the flies are thick. Anytime you see an Aussie waving, he’s not saying hello, he’s trying to get the flies to go away. You wait for the sun to go down for them to go away, but then the mossies come out. Been swimming in a lake and the Murray River, camped in the woods for 3 days and no one worried about the poisonous critters. Not saying one won’t kill me next time but all I’ve seen are koalas and kangaroos. Bloody Koalas keep you up at night with their grunting booty calls. Did get to shoot an IPSC match a couple of years ago – shooters are great folks everywhere.