Now it's not like we're in the bush and our neighbours are like 6 miles away. No, the house is - I want to say rural - {well there are horses, donkeys, goats and a llama down the street} but not farmland. We are completely surrounded by woods with huge trees and bristly underbrush that requires quite an effort to get through it. There's the occassional open space and creek/boggy/marshy area to provide a resistance that is a pain in the butt.
We have snakes (so far we've had direct contact with 5), tortoises (2), frogs ( a real mixture), toads *even more so!), spiders (they put out daddy long-legs to shame!), raccoons (haven't seen them but seen the evidence that they enjoyed playing on our porch!), deer (3), foxes (well it might be just one but we've had two encounters with them), various birds and a myriad of insects.
The snakes have been ok except for one. Our neightbors across the road actually have a bigger body of water on their property and it appears that the copperheads and cottonmouths prefer that to our property of woods and small creek. We've had encounters with a brown rat snake and a black one too (this was the one that got into the office via the window and scared the living daylights out of me!), a king snake (Woody - our next door neighbor told us that we want this snake around the house as once you have one of these all other snakes will stay away and thankfully these are not the same as the king snakes back in Oz). We also had an encounter with a gold ringed timber snake and another that we just saw the tail of. I don't like snakes and I know that they're more afraid of us than we are of them (but I swear that theory was sorely tested when that one came sliding through the window and plopped on the floor in the office!) and I really hate to kill things (except cockroaches. I hate cockroaches!) so I hope that the snakes have heard my requests that they stay away from the house and leave us all alone. My only worry is the dogs (especially Oscar) as their desire to go into the muddy creek right now to cool off is putting them into (potentially) harm's way as the creek is frightfully bushy and uncleared.
We had no idea that we had turtles in the area. Our neighbor's son and his friends are "herps" - Herpatologists..well training ones anyway. But they know a bucketload of stuff about the critters in the area. Anyway, one day the collection of boys asked if they could take a look around our property and check out snakes etc. They found no snakes (granted it was early evening) but found our skinks (such pretties with blue tails) and another lizard that I forget the name of but it looked like a frilly necked lizard from Oz just smaller and then one found an Eastern Box Turtle. He took it with him (which kinda took me by surprise but he's responsible). Since then we've found another one and got some pics.
Frogs and toads abound around us and I cannot tell you how excited I am that we have such a wide variety as well as the amount. We have Leopard frogs, tree frogs, pickerel frogs and bull frogs. The toads I canot tell you the names of except there's woody loooking ones, grey ones, brown ones and red ones. We have a wide range of sizes too from ones that hide in my herb garden that are no bigger than my pinky finger nail to tadpoles that are surviving in the pond that are the size of my thumb and still haven't grown back legs as of yet. The bull frogs in our pond haven't grown as big as I've heard they grow but our neighbors have the ones that you need both hands to pick up. Ewww. Mr Bully in our back pond and I are working rather successfully towards a great relationship. He grunts when I talk - typical male!
Anyway, here's my pics of what I've managed to get so far. I wish I had my camera on me all the time when I walk the rounds but it's too bulky otherwise I'd have a lot more pics to offer you. I love that we have such a wide variety of animals and stuff for the kids to grow up around. So happy here.
Oh well. Here they are...
Outside our screened-in porch sliding doors on the bushes.
No comments:
Post a Comment