Wild Life
The house next door to us is for sale for the first time in seventy years, sparking flowing reams of real estate superlatives. Included in the selling points is ‘the high side of a quiet, no-through road’ and ‘idyllic setting for an active lifestyle.’ But mention of the abundant Australiana flora and fauna is curiously absent.
While impressed at the content of the advertising (is that really our little street?) I will say that quiet is a relative term. Our neighbour three doors down has taken to feeding birds at the break of dawn. Whilst off on my morning walk, channelling the abovementioned active lifestyle in the locale, I’ve counted over thirty cockatoos at a time, and I can assure you they are not quiet. A single bird’s screech is bad enough if caught at the wrong moment but catch a whole flock and your hearing will be under threat. And there’s little (read: no) chance of sleeping past six. It's a pity because they’re such comically adorable birds when they’re not in flight, waddling about gorging themselves on the wattle trees and refusing to move as people edge their cars around them trying to get to work.
That said, when researching the collective noun for cockatoos (cloud? riot? squabble?) it turns out we’ve got off with it lightly with just noise. One blogger helpfully commented they used the word gang, although when gathered in large numbers the proper term is deck-chewing b*****ds. Other suggestions include sulphur crested terrorists and a mob of beaked evil. Not so adorable after all.
Moving on to other local fauna, it’s probably wise to avoid mentioning we’re in the nocturnal bat corridor that deposits berry splatters on the backyard pavers in its wake, or the wasp nests that periodically form on the driveway planters. Ring tail possums are plentiful and surely expected, though while cute if momentarily spotted gripping the overhead power lines, they’re not so lovely tapdancing on the bedroom roof tiles in the small hours. The black steel cats with the reflective eyes my husband erected as possum deterrents are carefully stepped around as said possums squeeze into the rafters to take up residence in the roof cavity, ready to fatten up nicely for winter so they can’t get back out and Possum Man needs a call up.
New visitors to the hood of late are bandicoots, which seem to stay at ground level judging by the wide spread of miniature molehills across the front yard but in an added real estate selling point this encourages beneficial fungi. They have to share the street front yards with the bush turkeys though, those eternal nature strip prowlers. Potential house buyers should be aware never to let a bush turkey start a nest in their backyard – they are very territorial and your lovingly tended native borders will turn into a teetering pile of leaf litter in no time.
Other things to avoid mentioning in the real estate copy include the brown snake spotted on the riverside bush track and the nest of redbacks taking up residence under my worm farm (though these are thankfully silent). And I would certainly keep mum about the funnel web spider the size of a tarantula my bushside neighbour found on the lid of her recyclable bin.
All of this is implicit if you’re from a land down under. Our backyard wildlife is uniquely beautiful and pestilential, insanely dangerous, and sweetly loveable. But I might warn the next-door agent to avoid advertising the property overseas, just to be on the safe side. And it goes without saying the biggest selling point of all is the delightful neighbours.