What's out there?

I spent some time over the past couple of days slowly wandering around the yard, just looking to see what’s happening out there. I was going to cut back rampant plants and tidy up, but I went on a voyage of discovery instead. It’s a wonderful thing to really know the land you live on – whether that be the land you have purchased or the land you rent. We are part of the natural world, we should be familiar with our land and what's on it. Of course the common feeling is that if we are living on the land, we own it and it's own home. But there may be animals, insects and maybe even some reptiles sharing your land, and therefore it will be their home too.

My main quest during this time was to see if I could find any native bees. When we first came here there were a lot of them buzzing around, but lately I haven’t seen any. I found them almost immediately! I started looking in the vegetable garden, and there they were on the tiny yellow choko flowers. It's been raining overnight so there were no bees out this morning when I took these photos, but pictured below is the little flower favoured by our native bees. These bees don't sting and they produce honey that the aboriginess call sugarbag. It's generally found in hollow hogs or in the hollowed out skeleton of trees. No doubt, if I looked further, I might find some. Check out this wonderful post about native bees on Shell's blog Macadamia House.

A couple of days ago, when we were at my step son's home, I saw he is growing one of the trees we have in our yard, one that I never knew the name of. It's in the chook run and was planted by the people we bought the house from. It's a pecan tree! It's now in flower so I'll be keeping my eye on it to see if we get some pecans in late summer or early spring. Apparently they don't produce well until they're fairly old so we may be in luck. If you click on the photo below you'll see it more clearly. If you look at that upturned pot on a stick in the middle of the photo, immediately behind that is a lemon three, on the left of that is the pecan (light green) and the dark green tree on the far left is a fig tree.

You can see by the photo above how messy the vegetable garden is right now. We'll clean it up fairly soon but there is a cyclone forecast in the next couple of days so we'll wait to see what damage that does and clean up afterwards. We might not have a garden. ; - )

Do you know what is growing in your yard? Do you know what critters are out there? We have large pythons, tree snakes and, at times, brown snakes, water dragons that live in the creek but come up the sun bathe in the back yard. We have bandicoots, possums, echidnas - these are monotremes, there are a lot of funnel web spiders near the creek, we have a few red back (black widow) spiders near the house, skinks and larger lizards and many birds. We leave water out for the birds and this keeps them flying in to drink and bathe. I just heard the distintive call of the kookaburra and turned to see one sitting on the back fence. There is a family of them living on our land (ours meaning the land we all live on), they eat snakes, lizards, mice and rats, and also grasshoppers and large insects.

I think identifying what lives on your land would be a good project to get the kids involved in. I know my kids would have loved that kind of thing, especially as it serves a practical purpose. It would get them connected to their land and show them the diversity of life around them. All you'd need is a book for displaying specimens, some glue, a digital camera to photograph what is found - these could be printed and glued in the book, scissors for cutting leaves and flowers, and the internet for identifying what's in your area. Don't forget the night time animals too. I think a book that identifies all the living things on the land you live on would be an excellent resource to have. It could sit along side your homemaker's manual - a book for inside and out.