Wildlife in our Garden at Willunga

 What an exciting surprise tonight while we were having our evening drink and sitting in the sitting room as the mosquitoes are so bad outside ... something was knocking on our patio door and I thought "oh,no, not another cat or kitten dumped on us"..but when I switched on the outside light, there was an Echidna, hiding in the potplants, how exciting was that! We had seen one many years ago in the orchard but not since then. For my European readers an Echidna is not a hedgehog.....it is one of the rare animals left in the world. It is a monotreme and lays an egg which takes 23 days to develop when it gets moved to a pouch on the mother's belly and is suckled for two to three months. When the baby develops spines it is moved to a burrow. The mother suckles it for another three or so months. The babe is called a puggle...

It will be lovely if he stays around (Is it a he? or a she?) and eats all the trillion of ants we have here. There are ants nests in the ceiling as the little critters fall out of the pine ceiling at certain times of the year and the Studio has litter made by them at the edges of the skirting boards.
If you are on your knees in the garden weeding or planting things you are immediately chewed on by ants to see if you are a corpse or not and need cleaning up.

 I have been raking up a lot of bark and gum leaves the last week or so ready to burn and I did see an unusual patch which looked as though something had been making a circle in the litter.
I know one year I startled a bearded Dragon hiding under the bark when I was raking up the litter and it looked at me with it's beady eyes in a rather accusing fashion. Sadly we never see the Dragons any more, I think the vineyards have probably destroyed their habitat.

 I found this rather lovely and startling red gum blossom too when  I was raking up yesterday,
such a contrast to the grey and brown leaves and bark and wondered if it may not have been a fairy's substitute for an ostrich feather used in a dance......
It seems a shame to rake up and burn all this litter but we have to prepare for next summer's fire danger season I suppose

This very handsome grey water cover is in our verge. It is where the grey water for the vineyards is piped from.
The water people have made an absolute mess of our verge and it is very difficult to keep it mowed in winter as there are rocks embedded in the top soil now and doesn't do the mower much good....not much good complaining though, authorities don't take the slightest bit of notice.....