Found a funnel web in the pool yesterday, but we left "little" atrax robustus alone a whole extra day before fishing him out — these spiders are notoriously slow to drown and have been known to recover even after two days' submersion.
Won't catch me thrusting my hand into the pool filter for a couple of days, I can tell you that for free. If there's any part of the Australian wildlife that scares me, it's spiders that belong higher on the food chain than me, and know it.
Came home today to find the biggest stick insect in the world1 hanging out by the rabbit's cage.
At first I told myself, no, it's a stick. Really, it's just a stick.
A stick with six perfectly aligned legs, complete with teeny feet clinging to the balustrade. A stick with antennae.
You know what's ridiculous? I couldn't actually get up the gumption to stick my hand too close to this fellow, when two weeks ago I had my face only inches away from one of the deadliest land snakes… Granted, the snake was a baby, and allegedly dead at the time, but still… No one ever died from a stick insect. I'm just saying.
Today the girl-cat brought home a gift:
I'm not sure precisely what kind of snake it is, although it is teeny tiny, so I suspect it's a baby something. Which is kind of worrying, because that means there's a mother, presumably a rather larger mother, somewhere nearby. The colour makes me suspect it's a baby brown, but the faint white ridge across the back of its neck seems out of place for it to be a brown. Provided the ridge is natural colouring, and not some scar or wound inflicted by the cat, of course. I don't think it is.
See how tiny it is? And of course it's dead, so nothing to worry about…
…Except when I went out to check the mail, a couple of hours later, baby snake was missing. I did not clean up baby snake's corpse. No one else in the house cleaned up baby snake's corpse.
Baby snake was only playing dead, and has escaped to grow, and grow, and grow…
Which means my cousin, who took the photo below, is feeling rather grateful that Baby Snake did not launch at her face during the photo shoot.
ETA: I just looked up the common brown snake on Wikipedia1, and found:
Juveniles have a black head, with a lighter band behind
Yup. Baby Snake just may be a baby brown. Which means there's a community of 1.5m snakes around here somewhere — and, given they birth a clutch of 10 – 40 eggs, there's at least 9 other baby browns out there somewhere. Good stuff. We're definitely into the "shoes must be worn while outside" season.