Wild life near you
We did our usual grocery shop this morning rather than yesterday. After the shop, we went to a cafe in the same suburb and as usual sat outside. Just after the coffee had been served, there was an enormous screeching sound as a large flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos perched on a nearby angophora. There must have been 50 of them, perhaps more. We' often see flocks of them, but this was the largest in a very long while. They're beautiful birds to look at, but their call is far from attractive.
What is your local wildlife (neighbours children excepted)? Do you see much?
Angophora - https://www.google.com/search?q=angophora&oq=angophora&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQLhhA0gEINDgyM2owajGoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Sulphur-crested cockatoos - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur-crested_cockatoo
What is your local wildlife (neighbours children excepted)? Do you see much?
Angophora - https://www.google.com/search?q=angophora&oq=angophora&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQLhhA0gEINDgyM2owajGoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Sulphur-crested cockatoos - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur-crested_cockatoo
Comments
All natives and also the usual introduced pests such as rats and Indian mynahs. I once saw a fox skulking around at dawn and wondered whether he’d hitched a ride from out the back of Windsor ( 60 km away).
Foie gras land is a bit more exotic. We have a hedgehog that pootles about of an evening, plus a few bats (Any creature that eats mosquitoes is alright by me). A praying mantis once dropped out of our tree onto the patio, which is the only time I've ever seen one.
It's also the case that the main animal populations are dogs and cats.
We have few land mammals, but we do see mice, rats, hares, and sea otters.
Offshore we get dolphins, various whales, and famously basking sharks.
We have a beautiful fox which we see several times a week walking along the back wall before it jumps down into the churchyard.
Lots of grey squirrels and occasionally field mice- last year one got itself stuck inside the bird feeder.
This year the bird life is not as diverse as it used to be but we've had blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, blackbirds, robins, dunnocks, house sparrows, starlings, wood pigeons, wrens. We also have herring gulls that sit on top our chimney pot.
In previous years we've also had gold finches, sparrow hawks, wood peckers, gold crests.
Not bad for such a small space!
Wildlife near you - Most recent by Hedgehog 🦔 🙂
As to Birds, there are, as one would expect, varieties of Gull, along with Ducks (mostly Mallards), Swans, Wood-Pigeons, Collared Doves, Sparrows, Starlings, Blackbirds, Swifts (I think) and Martins (not sure which sort). Occasional visitors are Kingfishers (all one usually sees is a flash of that most gorgeous blue), Egrets (the little pure-white cousin of the Heron), big Herons, Shags, Cormorants, and (in cold winters) Redshanks.
We used to see flocks of Dunlins and Lapwings, feeding on the edge of the water as the tide came in, but, with global warming, they rarely come this far south these days.
Lots of Insects, especially in the parts where vegetation has been undisturbed (No-Mow May!), including Butterflies, but not many Bees just yet - hopefully, more will appear as the wild flowers bloom.
One Beastie probably not seen much inland is the Sea Slater:
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/marine/crustaceans/sea-slater
We don't have many rocks, but the Sea Slaters still find plenty of holes and crevices in which to lurk. Seeing a large one (3 centimetres long) for the first time can be a bit of a shock, but they are entirely harmless.
Wood storks used to come to my house looking for bugs, as do the ibises.
We have manatees, dolphins, all kinds of fish and an occasional shark in the canals.
Deer, wild hogs, bears, are in the woods and often in our yards, and Florida panthers!!!!
Oh, yes. Alligators and American crocodiles live here. And all four of the American venomous snakes, plus the good ones we like to keep around: indigo, black racer, corn snakes, red racers. And lots of different kinds of lizards, including iguanas who have made themselves quite at home here. Oh, and monitor lizards have been in the area.
Unfortunately, we are plagued with a huge number of Burmese pythons, which only have humans as natural enemies.
The more I think about this, the more local critters I think of. Like burrowing owls! Very cute and very fearless!
Apart from rats, mice and the occasional urban fox, there are fewer mammals. Squirrels are common less than a quarter of a mile away, but are absent here. We do though get two sorts of Pipistrelle.
Plus, we have many kinds of birds, including bald eagles and red-tail hawks. And Canada geese regularly act as traffic police.
Where we are in the summer, the black bear population has exploded over the last decade or two, to the point that you have to be very careful about trash or leaving food in your car. You also have to be very careful when walking or running at certain times of day.
Unlike brown bears and grizzly bears, brown bears typically aren’t aggressive unless they feel threatened, or unless the bear in question is a mama bear and her cubs are nearby.
We have about 4-5 magpies in our area as well as visiting crimson rosellas and grass parrots. Occasionally, we get sulfur crested cockatoos flying over with their noisy call. I love seeing the little wrens hopping around the garden, they move so quickly. This year I noticed an Indian Mynah, yuk, I hope it won't return. We also have a noisy wattle bird who loves our camellias and I think this must have been the attraction at our previous home where a very loud one would land on our verandah railing and tease our old black cat. That bird was a cheeky one.
At the same residence we used to have a possum or two that would run across our roof about 9pm every night, I used to listen for him. He would jump from the neighbours trees, run across our roof, down the length of the house and then into a very large white mulberry tree in our back garden. At times they also used to sleep inside our garage roller door and when we raised or lowered the door we would hear it thump around inside. I do miss him at our new place!
We make a real effort to keep our cats inside so as to give the wildlife a chance. They love watching cat tv out the front window as one particular maggie lands on our small water feature to drink and the long haired cat waits there to watch for him. I love that the birds can be observed with all the relevant "chatter", but can't be harmed by our furry ones
I feel very blessed to live in an environment with these lovely animals. They are protected, and that's a very good thing.
My nephew used to live in your part of the world and moved to Suffolk a few years ago. He commented that the roadkill up there is a lot more posh saying that in Kent you’d see dead foxes and rabbits at the side of the road, whereas in Suffolk it tends to be deer and pheasant.
Hedgehogs, hares and gulls mainly here. Frogs in season. Cars if there are black cows on the common grazing in the dark.
Doublethink, Admin
Rabbits are to be seen in the fields just upstream from Arkland - a former neighbour used to shoot a few now and then (for food - Rabbit Pie...
I forgot to mention earlier that we also have Magpies (noisy b*****s), and Rooks (or Crows - which one is it that looks as though it's wearing baggy shorts?).
Where I grew up, there were standard Canadian Shield fauna: wolves, bobcats, loons, herons, great grey and snowy owls, beavers, black bears, moose. I've only seen a bobcat once as they are quite shy. Other than the birds, these are all high on the "Do Not Mess With" list.
Moose are enormous. If you hit a deer with your car, the car will drive away; if you hit a moose with your car, the moose will walk away.
That we know of, our suburban garden has produced at least four broods now this year, one of blue tits and two of sparrows, as well as the swifts.
We get hooded crows. They look like they're wearing grey tailcoats.
Birds – flocks of parakeets which have displaced a lot of our small native birds. They clean out my bird feeders before anything else gets a chance. Quite a lot of starlings still. I hear a blackbird singing in the early morning but I don’t know where it comes from. I get the occasional great tit or robin, sparrows are in the area but I don’t seem to get them in my garden. I used to have goldfinches a few years ago but they seem to have disappeared.
Otherwise – wood pigeons and magpies show up occasionally, and recently we have started to get seagulls. A very rare visitor from the local park was a kestrel last year. My best sighting so far this year – not in the garden but circling overhead – a pair of Red Kites. I guess they have spread from the Chilterns which they have colonised in recent years, and I assumed they came from the park.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/09/how-parakeets-escaped-and-made-britain-their-home
- Blackbirds
- Robins
- Great Tits
- Blue tits
- Long-tailed Tits
- Wrens
- Dunnocks
- Goldfinches
We also see or hear the following on a regular basis:We have also been fortunate to see Sea Eagles
Among the mammals, we see:
I know that there are Hedgehogs around but I haven't actually seen them.
As a contrast, when we were in Canada, we saw regularly:
We also have some very noisy magpies and the odd jackdaw in the garden, skylarks in the fields and crows nesting in the trees nearby. There are pied wagtails on the roads outside, swifts in the orchard nest boxes and heron and little egrets fish in the brook; the heron also sits on rooftops on our estate. There used to be a green woodpecker in the school grounds and he was wonderful to watch fly, undulating low swoops. A solo red kite has a visit over our park late morning.
When they built the new estate they also built a nature reserve with a big lake so lots of ducks and geese and the occasional kestrel. There are hare in the fields around it and bunnies near the railway track. There are badger sets by the cycleway and the occasional muntjac used to wander in our garden before we fenced it off.
@Cheery Gardener your purple swamp hens are probably the birds we call pukeko here. I think they may also be in South Africa. The estuary also has royal spoonbills and on odd occasions I have seen a white heron/kotuku visiting.
My favourite birds are the papango/blackscaups. They are small black diving ducks. When they're only a few days old the can dive down 1.5 metres to scoop up food. Sometimes I walk along the river to the shops and look out on what seems to be an empty stretch of water only to have a few pop up. It always brightens my day to see them as they were seriously affected by disease for a while and also by the silting up of the river during the quakes. They are definitely making a comeback now though.
I went into the orifice* to see if I could see it leave, as the box is next to the window, and was distracted by a poor female stag beetle that was caught up on an old cobweb on the window. While I was extricating that, the swift left, so I only saw it out of the corner of my eye.
*orifices are more fun that offices.
I've seen wrens, tits (blue, great, coal), robins, woodpigeons, goldfinches, and willow warblers (pretty sure it was them and not chiffchaffs) out of the back window that I can remember off the top of my head. There are sparrows down the road but they don't seem to like our end of the road so much. We live near one of the Edinburgh hills, so we can see various birds from time to time when we walk there - blackcaps, dippers one year, kestrels, dabchicks (not to mention more ubiquitous species): I have seen a buzzard from my front window.
As mammals go, there are foxes about, and the hill has rabbits and also bats (pipistrelles, both kinds, daubenton's - I know because I went on a bat walk one evening). I saw roe deer on the hill a couple of years ago and I once saw a weasel. I have also seen a dead badger in the road, though I've never seen signs of living badgers.
On the other hand, if they both did it, there’s your breeding pair…