Snakes in the Grass

Of the worlds twenty five most venomous snakes, twenty of them live in Australia. In the list of the so called hit parade, it is not until you get to Number 13  the first snake from outside of Australia gets a look in, or should that be fang in; the Cobra.

There are different ways to determine how deadly a snake is and you will find some discussion as to exactly how the list of the most venomous is comprised. As far as the number of people killed each year by snakes, the fact that Australia records about four deaths a year from snake bite, belies the underlying danger.

The list I have quoted is from data published by the Australian Venom Research Unit which uses a unit of measure called the LD50. Without going into specifics it is a measure of how much venom produced by a snake will kill you. The lower the score the higher the kill power.

 A red bellied black snake cleans out the tadpoles in the paddling pool.

 In Australia snakes simply are a fact of life.On our five acres of paradise we have encountered tiger snakes, number 4 on the list, rough scaled snakes ( 16), red bellied black snakes (21), crown snakes   ( venomous but not in the top 25), as well as carpet pythons and diamond pythons. The last two will kill your chooks, maybe your dog or cat and inflict a nasty bite, but are non venomous.

To put all this into perspective, the Eastern diamond-backed rattlesnake, the first entry on the list from America, comes in at number twenty three of the most venomous snakes on the planet.

Hey every place in the wondrous world has it's good points and it's bad. Appreciate the good and cope with the bad, what more can you do?

The majority of snake bites in Australia result from people not leaving the damn things alone.

" The only good snake is a dead one" is a common catch cry. 

It is in the attempt to kill that you have to get close. A  snake that is threatened or indeed hurt is a very dangerous critter and rightly so. Humans get pretty riled and tetchy in similar circumstances! The fact that killing wildlife is illegal seems to matter not.

 A carpet python makes itself comfortable in the my shed.

The phobia of snakes, it even has a name, Ophidiophobia, is the second most common phobia suffered by humans in the world. It is argued in our early tree dwelling days, the snake was one of the few animals that could harm us hence the deep seated fear we possess. If one learns to accept them they certainly pay you no mind. As a previous ophidiophobic I can attest to that. They are like any other creature. They live by their own means in their own world and with some obvious intelligence generally keep well away from human activity. However it is the consequence of not realising they are there that should always keep one alert.

A red bellied black snake again, not always easy to see if you are not observant.

Living remotely it is important to learn about where you might find snakes and avoid them as much as you can. Have access to a compression bandage, know how to use it correctly and have some thought as to how you could find a makeshift splint.

The majority of advice of how to deal with a snake bite assumes three things; you are not alone when bitten, you are close to assistance and you have a mobile phone. When you have thrown the safety net of suburban dwelling away and where you are in the place where you are more likely to find serpentine friends, these assumptions are in the main incorrect. If you happen to have a mobile phone in your pocket, it is unlikely to have coverage, and your trusty compression bandage and splint are back in the car. Damn!

I mentioned this to my doctor once as I was interested in what a medical person would say. You are advised to stay still, apply the compression bandage, fasten a splint to prevent movement and send someone for help. So what do you do if you are out walking and get bitten by a snake, have no compression bandage, no splint and the chance of someone hearing your cries or happening along is about as likely as the average Joe Blow walking on water?

His answer was pragmatic and simple; improvise and move.

" You could tear your shirt and make an improvised compression bandage. Find a stick or anything to use as a splint. If you were bitten on the leg (incidentally the most common place to be bitten), find a makeshift crutch to help you get along without using your leg as much. If you do not think anyone is ever going to find you within an hour or so, then move."

At least I had an answer and one that I have never seen documented. Maybe people do not want to truth. 

My neighbour always said in case of snake bite you should carry one of those fancy cigars that come in the aluminium pipe cannister, and a box of matches. When I asked him why he replied, " So if you get bitten by a tiger snake you can sit down, light the cigar and enjoy those last dying moments with pleasure!"

A carpet python in the garden with the rhubarb. You have just got to learn to live with them.

Move On or Be Eaten.

If you scroll through some of the "electronic grafitti" as our current hipster Prime Minister calls comments on facebook ,twitter and the like, you will find some review of what visitors to Australia think of Australians.

" very friendly and laid back people."

"aussies are so chill and nice".

"egalitarian give everybody a fair go."

In the main positive and complimentary analysis. However behind the social facade lies a deep and murky Australia. Not egalitarian and give everybody a fair go but a selfish give ME a fair go, I want, I need, you have, I take.  I am talking country Australia where you had best protect yourself from the thieves and vandals.

Our move to the country was borne from the desire for freedom and space, to reconnect with nature and a chance to provide for ourselves with something we had grown for our kitchen table.Our new largely barren garden needed work to achieve our last goal but we set about building our new life.

It is recognised the addition of trees to a property adds value without costing too much other than time. We set about our task adding a mini orchard, trees for shade, trees for climbing and trees to attract the wildlife.

"Several recent nationwide surveys show that mature trees in a well-landscaped yard can increase the value of a house by 7 percent to 19 percent." Frontdoor realestate

"Trees add value to a property, and a mature fruit tree adds even more value than a non fruiting species." Mary Francois Deweese Landscape Architect

As time has progressed have our trees added value to our property? Certainly in  aesthetics, comfort and financially in value added. Have we managed to provide an epicurian delight of fruit and jams and pickles for our kitchen table? The answer is simple, we have managed to provide a bounty but not one that we have managed to enjoy. The enjoyment has gone to the birds.

A rainbow lorikeet samples the nashi pears. It will then move onto the next one and then the next one until the entire tree is denuded. It has many friends to help in this arduous work.

Sulphur crested cockatoos make light work of the apples. The apples are too immature to pick and do anything with.

Look at the pretty sunflowers...yum, yum, yum.

We are onto our fourth or fifth iteration of a vegetable garden. What great lessons have we learnt here about getting produce grown and harvested for our usage and a little for our chooks?
Apart from the obvious and ongoing experimentation of what grows well in our micro climate and soil type we have learnt nature is not always ones friend. Perhaps nature is but some of natures little creatures are not.

Wallabies. Cute and adorable but rabid, regular, voracious eaters.

The vegetable garden is fully netted against the birds with a reinforced base of corrugated roofing iron to prevent the wallabies from eating through the netting to gain access.

From the kitchen window it looked like a small black snake was lying next to the car. In fact two small snakes, how strange. It took a while and about $100 worth of new wiper blades. for us to learn this one. When you get home and park the car, cover the wiper blades as the crows come and eat them out of their mountings and throw them on the ground. The small snakes were discarded wiper blades.

We found lengths of irrigation pipe made the quickest and most robust protection for the windscreen wipers.

We have embraced the frogs in all their wonderful cacophony. They are a sign of a good robust environment and they do not steal vegetables or fruit.

We have learnt to combat the micro bats living inside the eaves with a well placed camphor ball deterrent. They too create only a potential hazard with their droppings and a nuisance with the smell. They again are not thieves, just occasional and minor vandals.

An unusual find, a microbat was inside in the daylight behind the curtain. They used to regularly get inside via the light fittings and fly around in the dead of night until we worked out the deterrent.

The camphor balls hanging at an entrance point to the eaves.

We have learnt to accept and coexist, albeit warily, with our elongated friends who again leave well enough alone as we do them.

A red bellied venomous black snake in the grass.

A red bellied black snake clears the paddling pool of tadploes.

A carpet python rests next to the rhubarb. When you come across this unexpectedly it is the poobarb patch!

The chook egg thieves call occasionally and feast for a few days until our intrusion sends them on their way.

Don't get me wrong, we love our life in the country now that we have cottoned on to how to cope with the intrusion of our animal friends. But back to the descriptions of Aussies as applied to the native animals that visit....

" very friendly and laid back people."...Our place is a regular Woodstock! Free food, free music, no violence, no wonder they come in their droves!

"aussies are so chill and nice"...Put it this way, they don't mind us being here in fact we provide all this yummy food for them!

"egalitarian give everybody a fair go." They give all their mates a fair go but I wish they would leave us just one nectarine, one pineapple guava, one plum, one apple, one peach so my wife and I could share just one taste of what our fruit trees provide for them all. Is one too much to ask for?

Rain spotting, a national pastime.

The Nylex 600 Rainmaster. Oh it’s a beast of a machine. Zero to twenty five in …well… as long as it takes. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes over a month and on scary occasions, well over several months. The numbers are millimeters you see, millimeters of rain, something that was once called inches of rain.

The proof that middle aged insanity has developed is that I was excited to be given a rain gauge for Christmas. Well it beats underpants and socks!

“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure,”  states Alice Hoffman in her book Here on Earth.

The Nylex 600 Rainmaster is designed to add some surety to the weather. Science is purely the act of taking measurements and using the numbers to understand what is happening and predict what future numbers could be. The Nylex 600 Rainmaster is just the ticket to help me make the measurements of rainfall and provide a clearer pattern of what the weather might bring.

I am not alone in my endeavours. Where I live, everyone in the region, everybody in the town has a rain gauge of some sort. There are always the official Government weather centres with their fancy Stephenson screens and their white coated automatons checking their fancy instruments to report at designated times in a coordinated regime to provide a national media weather report. However as anyone can tell you, when they say it is a hot twenty eight in the city, you are sweating your skin off in what appears to be the back draft from the engines of a Boeing 747 on take off. The data they provide is too broad, not specific enough for your own situation.

The national news says it will be raining in Sydney with a temperature of 25 degrees C ( 77degs F), a fine day for Brisbane and a warm 30 degrees C ( 86 degs F), but what about in between? It is a bloody days drive between the two cities, we have weather too you know!

“Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.”  Kim Hubbard

Everybody talks about the weather but here in Australia the main topic is usually rain and or the heat. The rain is quite specific if there has been any.

 “We got 19 last night!”

“Gee we only had 11”

“ Seriously?  It was 34 out our way”

It is back to the millimeters thingee again and it is a serious business, every millimetre counts. Every millimeter counts because every body is counting. Having a rain gauge at home is like having a mailbox or a front door.

If it rains heavily you want to know how heavily. Was it as much as the 256.5 millimetres we had in 24 hours on the 29^th of January 2013? In three days we had 515mm’s of rain. That is 20.3 inches of rain! That had me scrambling to build an ark! With that amount of water falling you know you are going to have serious issues getting about if getting about is even possible.

With a rain gauge you can assess how different your own particular weather is from anyone elses, you can see year to year trends, you can analyse whether the changes to the weather are going in a particular direction or are cyclic.

With a rain gauge you can plan.  Your can plan your holidays, plan a special event or party,  plan your garden planting, plan your water restrictions to cope with the dry months ( the only water that supplies our house comes from what we collect from the roof and store in a tank).

As virtually everyone, at least in regional and rural Australia, has a rain gauge, you can see at almost a micro level what your climate actually is. It is liberating. Knowledge is power.

So yes, the  Nylex 600 Rainmaster is a well utilized feature of our property and it is a beast of a machine.  

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, with the least amount of water in rivers, the lowest run-off and the smallest area of permanent wetlands of all the continents.

One third of the continent produces almost no run-off at all and Australia’s rainfall and stream-flow are the most variable in the world.

Australian Government fact sheet.

Sunday drive to the tip.

It was impossible to find an accurate figure as to how many households in Australia do not have a waste collection service. Given we live within  40kms of a major regional centre and are one of the no collection households, there must be quite a few. The kerbside service that extends up this way ends when the asphalt roads turn to gravel. We cannot have dirty rubbish trucks now can we?

It is imperative we clear our waste materials. Luckily we have a refuse transfer centre about 10kms away. However, with a load of stinking household scraps and waste, brewed in the heat of summer, infested with fly maggots, the journey is not for the faint hearted.

I have given up trying to squeeze the smelly trash into the car, the smell is unbearable so I hoist this onto the roof of the car. I usually do this every two weeks. My journey has to coincide with when I am not working (I am a shift worker), and  one of the three days a week when the transfer centre is open.

The volume of municipal waste generated per person in Australia (606kg) is more than that generated in Canada (411kg), Germany (555kg), and England (574kg). However, Australia generates less municipal waste per person than the United States (927kg). Souce Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006/7

We recycle nearly every thing we can. Therefore the greatest volume of material going to the refuse transfer station or what us Australians call the tip is made up of recyclable material.

The recyclables are jammed into the car.

All green waste we generate including weeds, tree branches, some paper, is composted or used as mulch.  The tip does have an area for green waste but we have enough space to not need it. Plus all organic matter we can return to the earth is vital to improve the quality of our acidic clay soil.

The refuse transfer centre in all its glory. The yellow bin is for recyclables, the area on the left is for waste metals and tyres. The green building houses a large open container for general waste.A truck comes from the regional city centre every week to replace the bins with fresh ones and remove the full bins.

The green waste section. This is tilled into a mulch which is free to remove. However we do not use it anymore as it was full of weed seed.  

Putting the rubbish out is a relatively time consuming household chore but there is one main benefit. It is not often I do not come home with something useful that someone else has discarded.Anything that is being discarded that could be of use to someone else is generally placed next to the bin. Nothing of value remains long. 

Not much to write home about this time but some large planter and some firewood for next winter.

New Friends.

It was clear the bird  was having some difficulties when it had remained motionless on top of the netting of the chook enclosure for over six hours.A magpie is a relatively large bird and not one to linger alone. They generally move as a raucous group, warbling and carrying on, noisy neighbours of the best kind that always lift the spirits with their presence.

Although exposed it had chosen a difficult place to rest, virtually unreachable to land bound creatures. There was something quite wrong as the bird did not make any attempt to move or fly as two long lengths of wood I had bound together prodded beneath it's feet. After checking it's claws were not caught in the netting, I managed to get the pole under it's feet and gently began the process of bringing the sick bird towards me.

Marjie my wife was ready to carefully handle the bird and place it within a box she had lined with towels. This was a wild independent avian but had no fight. All expectations of flapping and clawing and biting did not eventuate gladly.The box was carefully placed in an open area in the safety of our deck and water and some food pushed towards it. It sat motionless but did not stumble or waiver. There was no obvious trauma, it was as if it had seen something horrific and was in shock. We retreated and left it in peace not wanting to add to its distress.Some twenty four hours later it was still there unchanged and as motionless as a statue.

Two days later and our sick companion was still acting as if shell shocked, oblivious to everything and anything going on around it. The water and food we had left for it appeared untouched and we were left waiting for the sad moment when it had had enough. It was still upright, it's eyes open staring into an unknown dimension.

Mid morning on the third day it was gone. We looked high and low to ensure it was not hiding elsewhere. The bird had definitely vanished. How strange?

Our sick bird with it's distinctive flat top sitting trance like.

 An hour or so later we walked onto the deck to get on with the day and get cracking in the garden.It was then they appeared.

Our sick magpie flew passed in formation with another adult and two smaller birds. They flew passed us again quite close and then returned and repeated the exercise. Uncanny! It was like an RAF flypast as if we were being thanked and our sick bird now well was showing us the family and its gratitude. Humans are funny and frail. They always put their emotions onto the animal kingdom as if they had none of their own.

The very next day two small young magpies were sitting on the railing of the deck outside the kitchen. Our rescue bird sat in a nearby tree keeping watch. Marjie sliced some cheese into very small pieces and carefully placed it on the railing and retreated. The two birds, a male and female we later discovered, polished that off and flew away.

Two juvenile magpies, one male, one female become regular morning visitors

The same ritual was repeated the next day, and the next until the watcher did not bother keeping tabs on his charges. By now we were feeding by hand if we wished and all barriers were lost between us. We only provided enough for a treat not a life style option. Laziness can be adopted by animals just as in humans if the living is made too easy.

We named these two Marvina and BB, short for broken beak as its beak has been malformed resulting in a large under bite. They have in turn brought their children to us but so much more. We were new here finding a life in the country after years within concrete and asphalt. New friends had found us and a window to the natural world was opened. What a wonderful window it has been.

"You are a bit slow this morning mate! Where's me damn cheese?" Do we train animals or do they train us?

Sometimes you have to be a visitor, a ring in, to appreciate the subtleties of a place. The everydayness gets lost on most long term residents.It is as if the force of life like a strong running body of water, rounds a person like a river stone. The fit is perfect, calm, oblivious to the intensity of the energy that created it.

Australia on the face of it, is brash, assertive, self confident like a swaggering gunfighter. Australia calls a spade a spade and if the correct word was actually spode, Australia would still call it a spade. Somehow it is in the main, a lovable trait because it is cheeky, a dare to correctness.

However to describe Australia in the singular is to deny its plurality or multiplicity. Australia is vast. The largest farm in Australia spreads over 24,000 square kilometers or 9400 square miles.  The 65th largest farm in Australia encompasses 4000 squares kilometers or 1540 square miles.The most expansive farm in the United States of America, the land of super size, is in Texas and covers 3340 square kilometers or 1289 square miles.

Of the 234 countries that exist on this planet, Australia's largest farm is more sizeable than 84 of them. I live on a speck of 217,800 square feet, 20234 square meters, 0.234 square kilometers or 0.0078125 square miles, 5 acres in normal language. This is my piece of Australia, my perspective of the country and is really the only piece to which I can claim any authority. The sheer size of Australia precludes knowing more than a little about it all. Sure, understanding the broad strokes is easy, but drilling down into the details of Australia and being Australian is fraught with the danger of generalisation. It is like smear of vaseline over the lens of a camera to create an image with little texture, a face with no wrinkles.

I would like to share with you life in Australia, a life in Australia. It is the life of a ring in as you will find but hopefully that elicits objectivity. It is not as an exercise in narcissism, but provide a view of Australia as if a window were left open. You can be the voyeur.

                                 The view from the kitchen window on one day at one time.