Today I will cover some very small Australian Bad Things.
This one, not so small….
Hedge Grasshopper
I found this Hedge Grasshopper having a nose around my garage. He was probably 3 inches long (90mm). He actually turned his head to look into the camera. I’m sure he would have smiled if he had the required facial muscles.
I have included a picture of him here because the rest of the small Australian bad things I’m going to talk about are a bit too small to photograph. But before I move on to the very small stuff, I must tell you about the evening I was working late at my computer. It must have been around 1 am. I was surprised to hear a rather loud knock on the window.
Knock knock knock! Knock knock knock! “Who could that be so late” I wondered. Turns out it was a moth the size of a golf ball. Let’s go smaller.
I used an outdoor tap to clean out my esky (that’s a cool box in English) a while ago and as well as dispensing water, it also delivered some wasp larvae. So I sloped off rather quietly, knowing that somewhere nearby would be a very irrate (and stupid) mummy wasp. Some wasps out here can grow to just over an inch long and, apparently, have a spiteful sting.
But the good news is I really don’t see many wasps. Guessing, I would say that in my 18 months here I have only seen five or six. And they have all been outside, I’ve never seen one in the house. They also do not seem to be as “in your face” as European wasps. Given the heat and the outdoor bins I showed you yesterday, I would have expected to have seen more. But as someone who absolutely hates wasps, I’m pleased to say I haven’t.
Smaller than our grasshopper, moth and wasp but a bigger irritation is the fly. But here’s a big surprise for you. Where I live, and I mean the entire Brisbane area, they’re not that much of an irritation. Again, considering the heat and those bins you would have thought they’d be worse here than in England. But they’re not.
Having said that, I know that if you go north they become a bigger problem. But I think if you go north, most insects become a bigger problem.
Flies are also a huge irritation if you go anywhere near the cattle rearing countryside. When we stopped off to have a look at the 12 Apostles down in Victoria, which seemed to be home to many farms, the flies were impossible. Imagine having about 10 flies try to settle on your face every minute. Time to grab the Australian cork hat.
But there is one tiny itsy-bitsy small Australian bad thing of which we have gazillions. Some of them have been known to kill. I’ll tell you about him next week.
