A wild [insert name of potentially lethal animal here] appears!!

So, anyone who knows me will also know that I am scared of just about everything that life throws at me. Being in Australia has not helped this fact, since all of the wildlife is absurdly different to the way it is back home. Don't get me wrong, some of it is beautiful and amazing, but, as predicted, I am constantly terrified of everything around me.

I'll start with some of the nice stuff. For example, the birds here are beautiful! There are wild parrots all over the place, and each one seems to have a different, but equally amazing pattern. What with Wollongong being a seaside town, there are obviously seagulls, but their beaks and legs seem to be much more of a vibrant red colour than the ones back home. There are even a few pelacans who swim around the harbour on a regular basis (pretty much all the time, I see them every time I'm there). Even the ducks look different (they have really thin necks, and really big heads... I always think it looks like the head should fall off).

No matter what they look like, the birds seem to have confidence in excess. It takes a lot to make some of them fly away. The parrots are pretty playful and just fly around you (or maybe that's just me..?). There are cockatoos everywhere, and one of them even came and landed on my balcony while I was studying out there one time (I almost pooped my pants). They're a lot bigger close up, and it looked angry so I gave it an orange but it wouldn't go away. I resorted to shouting at it through the fly guard so that it couldn't get me.

The cockatoo that landed on my balcony and scared me so much

It's spring over in Australia at the moment, which of course means that all of the chicks are hatching. There are a few families of ducks that live on campus, and there are road signs to tell drivers to watch out for crossing ducklings. The parent ducks can actually be pretty hostile (I've had one hiss and charge at me as I walked past). Apparently a big thing over here is the danger of swooping magpies. I've been told that if you walk under a tree that has a magpie nest in it, then mama magpie will swoop down at you and try to peck your eyes out! There was a warning email telling us to avoid a certain part of campus that magpies are known to nest in, and I've not quite mustered up the courage to walk past there yet. There is a wikipedia article which makes the whole affair sound terrifying ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Magpie ) and the magpies are huge over here, so I don't think I'll be taking my chances any time soon.

Recently there has been a chicken wondering around the uni campus and around our accommodation. No one knows where it came from, and one day I wasn't concentrating on where I was going and ran into it at the top of my stairwell. I was so shocked when I saw it that I actually yelled (it probably sounded something like "ARRRGHHGHHAAAAHHHWWOOOAAHHAH"). I had no idea what I should do with it, so eventually I went to get Tash who helped me shoo it down the stairs.

As for the aquatic life over here, I find it fascinating. One day, Charlie and I were walking through campus. She looked into one of the many ponds and just said "WHAT THE F*** IS THAT?!" When we went to look a little bit closer, we saw that there were dozens of eels in the water along with a heap of small fish. I remember being shocked that something which is so "exotic" to us could be in suck close proximity to us the whole time and we hadn't noticed. Another time, I was walking to class and noticed a tortoise on the side of the foot path. I sat there for about five minutes just watching it poke its head in and out of its shell, and was devastated when I realised that I'd forgotten my camera (not left the house without it since to avoid other similar happenings). And when Charlie, Amanda, Debs and I were checking out the rock pools on the beach, we saw some red lump and couldn't decide was it was, so of course we poked it with a stick to find that it was an octopus!! That was probably my favourite find of the trip so far! It's not all fun and games though, because as summer goes on, there is more and more likelihood of jellyfish being in the water. No one has ever died from the sting of a blue bottle jellyfish in Australia, but I've heard the sting hurts like hell.

I haven't seen many reptiles apart from small brown lizards while I've been here, I saw a pretty big one today though and managed to get a picture before it scurried away. Wherever I go though there are warning signs about brown snakes and black snakes and other assorted dangerous snakes. I'm kind of curious to see one, but would probably be petrified if I did.

I haven't really seen anything in terms of wild mammals apart from the possums that live around campus. The Australians hate them and consider them to be vermin, but I think they're adorable and stroke them whenever they come down. The cutest thing was that when we first arrived in the country, one of them had just had a baby, and would come down with the baby on its back. There are, of course, the kangaroos and koala bears over here, but we don't see much of them in Wollongong, and the only experience we've had with them are in zoos. We did see a few wild roos on the road trip, but not for very long.

So I've talked about birds, fish, reptiles and mammals, so it is inevitably time to talk about creepy crawlies. After all the scare stories I was told before I came here, I am VERY relieved to say that I have had very little contact with spiders of any kind. When I first got here, I would check under my duvet and under the toilet seat for any that might have been under there, but after about a month I realised that I was just being silly, and that doing these things was probably not necessary... A small spider did land on me the other day when I was taking a walk, and I didn't crap my pants when I saw it, so I'm probably getting closer to being over my phobia. 

There are some pretty crazy bug here though, for example, there was a green thing on the wall of our stairwell that didn't move for about a week, about the length of you average MP3 player. I always dodged around it, and one time I came close to poking it with a stick, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, and I was scared that it would eat me (obviously an irrational fear because it obviously wouldn't have eaten me...), and then one day it just wasn't there anymore.

When we were in Nimbin, us Europeans had our first experience with fireflies. They looked so beautiful as they danced around the forest. Hamish even managed to catch one so that we could have a look at one up close, and seeing its back end light up like that was just bizarre. There are also lots of dragonflies around the Gong. I've seen them before in England, but not as big as these ones, and the other day I was lucky enough to find one that was just sitting on a flower, resting. It didn't seem too bothered that I was coming closer, and it sat there and posed for about five minutes while I took photos of it. Then of course there are the many multitudes of different bees, moths, butterflies, ants (I saw a massive flying ant land on my window and start chowing down on a bug it had caught which was about the same size as it), and other mini monsters that live around Australia, but I'll write some more about them once I've seen a little more of them.

In other news, I finally decided where I'm going to WWOOF! I'm going to live in the "Earthship" for a week and help make the final touches and help out with the farm animals. Below is a link to their website, and if you get a chance you should look around it and have a read of what they're all about, because I found it really interesting.

http://homepages.callplus.net.nz/~b.gubb/

I can't wait for uni to be over, and for the three month break to get here. Plans so far are to go to NZ from 20th Nov, work on that farm for a week, meet up with the Norwegians/whoever else is there at the time to explore the country for the remainder of my three weeks there, fly back to Melbourne on 20th Dec, be in Albury for Christmas (at Flic's house) and in Sydney for New Year's Eve! From there I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, but I'm sure I'll figure it out :)