The Golden Crowned Snake

Things I like about Sydney No. 14: Expecting the Unexpected...

As I walk down the drive of a morning, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, heading out for the first constitutional of the day, there are a few things I quite naturally expect. I expect that Sniff will be bounding ahead, peeing and sniffing as per usual, occasionally casting a backwards glance at me as if to say "Get a move on!"; I expect there to be the same two crested pigeons strutting on the lawn, pecking at the bare earth between the sparse tufts of grass for whatever it is that crested pigeons eat; I expect to stop and check up on the two curled-up balls of gray fur in the possum nest in the tree by our rotting gatepost to make sure they've survived another night of plunder; I expect Sniff to sniff afore-mentioned tree and to whine in frustration because he cannot reach the possum nest; I expect to be dive-bombed by a noisy miner or two squawking in their hideous fashion; and I expect to have to brush the odd cobweb from my face, built across the drive overnight by the ever-zealous golden orb weavers.

What I do not expect to come across, lying dead in the middle of the drive, is a snake. A SNAKE!!!!

After all, our neighbours, who I now obviously cannot trust an inch, told us in our first week here that the only snake they have seen in the neighbourhood in twenty years was a non-toxic python.

But this morning, lo and behold, there this was, spotted first by the eagle-eyed Daniel, then by me and then completely ignored by the mystifying Sniff:

Now there is something heart-stopping about coming across a snake: they are such rare creatures after all and unutterably shy, doing their utmost to avoid us humans if they can. So if you do see one it's normally out of the corner of your eye as it scuttles into the undergrowth. But here it was, this morning, revealed in its full, albeit deceased, glory: a snake.

Time for a bit of scientific investigation...

Once we had ascertained that it was indeed dead (it didn't run away, attack us or seem to mind the ants chewing at its underbelly) we turned it over carefully with a stick to see what the other side looked like...

This led Daniel, the native amongst us, to believe that it was an immature Red-Bellied Black Snake as the belly was indeed pinkish and the snake indeed rather small.

But I have done my research and can tell you that it is, as any fool would know looking at the markings on its head in the first photo, a Golden Crowned Snake...

Ordinarily the Golden Crowned Snake is exceptionally difficult to spot  because it is nocturnal, emerging at the same time as possums of a night to hunt for frogs, sleeping lizards and even other snakes. And not only is it nocturnal but it is also very secretive...which means that we could be surrounded by them without ever knowing. They are probably curled up underneath the house in their thousands; perhaps our drive positively writhes with them of a night.

The Golden Crowned Snake lays its eggs in January which then hatch in March. The young are 15 cm when born but this specimen was about 55 cm long which makes it an adult - one which sadly will never get to see its children...

But I know what you all want to know and.....YES! It is venomous...I quote from the Australian Museum, the natural history museum here in Sydney: "When cornered, these snakes flatten their heads, arch the neck strongly and make a series of striking movements with a closed mouth, but rarely actually bite. The Golden-crowned Snake is venomous, but not considered dangerous"  - presumably because no-one ever comes across the buggers...

I shall watch out over the next few days to see what happens to our Golden Crowned Snake. I've moved him (or her  - my scientific investigations were really rather limited) to the side of the drive so we don't drive over the body. Will it be eaten slowly by ants or swallowed whole by a magpie? Will there be a nightly vigil over the corpse officiated by its mate and offspring? Will our neighbours admit their foolish error when I point out the snake to them? Can you milk venom from a dead snake? Questions, questions.

For those of you thinking "Oh God, nature blah, blah, nature blah, animals, birds, blah, blah" I am going to be racking my brains to think of something I like about Sydney that has nothing to do with nature for my next few blog entries.

It may therefore be some time until you hear from me again....

A small update...

Disaster has struck at Berry Island. There are to be no more walks with Sniff bounding leashless along. This wretched warning sign appeared all over the island at the end of last week.

Distraught, Sniff and I continued on further, on to the next peninsula, to Balls Head Reserve. Only to be confronted by the same warning sign, inked with the same dates....

Damn those foxes. No more careening along the beach. No more peeing into the aboriginal waterhole. No more carefree fun. For over a month...

I am led to ponder what happens to all the dead foxes which accumulate throughout March. Is it part of the Ranger's job specification to search through the undergrowth and drag out all those 1080-poisoned corpses. And how can 1080 poison be lethal to cats, dogs and foxes and not lethal to possums or any other native creature? Very clever bit of science going on there.

Anyway, Poor Sniff is now reduced to this until April:

 

Here's something to help you all get your bearings as to where we are now living in Sydney. Our road, Glenview Street, becomes Vista Street at the end of which is, indeed, a vista -  a spectacular one of the CBD which Sniff, Daniel and I admire of a night whilst being besieged by Flying Foxes which mass alarmingly close above our heads in great numbers as dusk falls. Here it is, a blurred photo of the vista. The nearest wooded peninsula you can see snaking out into the water is Berry Island around which you accompanied me the other day and the peninsula to its left closer to the city is Balls Head Reserve, from the left hand side of which you get brilliant opera house and bridge views (coming to a blog near you soon). Both peninsulas are for now, miserably, ringing with the cries of dying foxes...

Berry Island

Things I Like About Sydney No. 13: Berry Island

Let me take you on a walk.

We'll just hop into the car for a few minutes, driving in what seems like the wrong direction just to get over the creek and the railway line, past Wollstonecraft station and then down Shirley Road lurching steeply downwards, suddenly reaching a dead end and thus arriving at the entrance to Berry Island.

There is a neat, green sign telling you where you are in case of confusion. To the left, over the sea, you can see Ball's Head Reserve and beyond that, the Sydney skyline. The Harbour Bridge peeps out behind Ball's Head Reserve far to the left.

You will have to wait a while before we head off on our gentle amble (this walk won't overly tax you by the way) so that Sniff can tear around the grassy area in front of us, sniffing at and peeing on every prominent tussock and stalk before choosing the perfect spot in which to roll around on his back with all four paws in the air. Once he has once more mastered the green we can set off.

 Here's the beginning of our walk: a small set of stone steps and a post declaring that all dogs must be kept on a lead on this bushwalk. The steps we climb, the sign we ignore. Sniff rarely strays from the path anyway...

Hopefully the sun is out but not too fiercely. Hopefully it's not raining. But more than likely it is either too wet or too hot and we just have to deal with it, juggling with the sun cream, insect repellent, umbrella and water bowl for Sniff in our bags. Much of our walk will be shaded and it's neither steep nor difficult so you can relax...honestly. 

We watch the ants crawling up the steps in steady streams and contemplate once more just how many ants there might be in the world before plunging on into the trees ahead.

Suddenly, it's like Picnic At Hanging Rock. We're in the bush. Cicadas fill the air with their whirring sound, the light filters sharply down through the eucalypts, panpipes start playing and your muslin dress floats behind you in the desultory breeze. There's no time to contemplate this phenomenon though as Sniff is charging ahead towards the aboriginal carving of a giant fish eating a stingray.

The fish is too large to capture in one photograph but you can see some grooves in the stone to the left of the watering hole, which were created over time by the sharpening  of tools. There also seems to be a carved boomerang shape to the left of the water. The faint outline of the fish extends across a much larger surface of stone, perched here with a great view down to the sea, where, now, industry has taken its toll on this particular piece of coastline. There seems to be some gasworks and several industrial-looking ships espied down there through the trees and, a few hundred metres on, we come across this monstrosity. It's the sort of ship that makes you wonder whether or not you are going to be arrested when taking photographs of it...It's definitely on a secret mission, hidden here behind Berry Island, invisible to the bustling city beyond.

Thoughts of spies and wars and bombs crowding your mind, we look round for Sniff and realise he's trotting ahead along the path towards the headpoint of the island where we can sit and contemplate the city skyline ahead of us and the iconic Harbour Bridge through the trees to the right. If you fancy, you could clamber down the rocks to the sea and indulge in some illegal fishing whilst I have a little snooze.

Depending on the tide, we now have the choice of either continuing around the path through the trees, listening to the occasional kookaburra calling whilst scaring lizards into hiding, or of descending down to the sea and continuing around the shoreline, clambering over rocks and scaring strange-looking beetles into hiding. Either way we're going to scare something.

As Sniff loves the smells of the shoreline we'll opt for the sea. 

As we climb over the rocks you notice all the broken oyster shells and the limpets suckered on to every surface. We ponder the possibility of bringing a knife and trying to pry some of the whole oysters off for tea. There is a loud voice calling through a megaphone and we briefly wonder if someone has spotted that Sniff isn't on a lead and that we're about to be fined. It turns out to be hailing from a military-looking boat moored over the sea by Balls Head Reserve and once more our minds fill with thoughts of conspiracies and covert operations.

Sniff bounds along happily back towards the green ahead in order to chase some odd-looking birds. "What are they?" you ask me. "Masked Lapwings" I knowledgeably reply. "So-called because of their flappy yellow dewlaps..." You then remark upon how green the grass is just as the rain begins to fall, eager to make it even greener.

We scoop up the dog and hare back to the car, pleased with the timing of our walk and the rain. We drive the crazy-seeming loop back home where I put the kettle on for a pot of tea. We then sit sipping tea and munching cake, sheltered on the verandah, watching the rain fall and fall and fall...

Let me take you on a walk.

Our first creekside downpour...

Things I like about Sydney No. 12: Our first creekside downpour.

I have always loved the rain in Sydney: it is often violent, appearing suddenly and heavily, causing flash floods and torrents of water to gush down the streets. Last night was our first downpour creekside and, as the rain persisted throughout the night, we woke to the sound of a raging torrent outside the bedroom window: our creek now seems to have pretensions to being a river which is rather magnificent.

There were consequences of all this water however which, although I can't say I liked, were most entertaining.

There we were, Daniel and I, sat on the verandah looking out into the night listening to the sounds of the rain thwacking down on the canopy of tree ferns and eucalypts, feeling secure in our little wooden haven with Sniff safely asleep in his basket within. We congratulated ourselves on our new-found home, bade goodnight to the bats and retired inside.

Daniel then lay on the carpet to feed his ever-increasing appetite for The Guardian obituaries which he can now dangerously peruse daily on his iPhone when he felt something crawling up his sleeve. He brushed away idly at the itch only to then see, to his horror, a three-inch leech fall to the carpet by his face. It and Daniel thrashed wildly about, the leech sadly thwarted in its mission to sucker itself into the folds of Daniel's juicy inner elbow. I, alerted by the sounds of the screams, ran through into the living room and then myself yelped in disgust as we watched how the leech raised itself vertically up into the air, extending its fabulously vile shiny body, waving about like an extending periscope looking for humans (ie. us) to latch onto and suck dry.

Daniel bravely scooped it up and perched it on the banister outside. At a safe distance we then watched its evil progress for a while, its constant undulating search for blood. Once back inside the house, our wooden haven didn't feel quite so secure any more and Daniel soon confused the scratching on his back caused by the tag in his underpants for another leech and sought to rip his clothes off in a frenzy of panic...

Ho hum.

Here's a few photos of our house and the verdant and dripping view down to the creek after last night's deluge including the balcony whereon the leech no doubt still lurks...the raging torrent that is Berry's Creek is hidden below the path in the last picture...

Denizens of our garden

Things I like about Sydney No. 11: the denizens of our garden.

I have to be brief. There is still cleaning to be done, boxes to sort through, emails to answer and bills to be re-directed. But I am temporarily escaping the nightmare that is moving to share with you some of the denizens of our new garden - at least those I've managed to blurrily capture on film. The striped marsh frog that clicks away merrily at night has escaped my feeble lens as have the currawongs, kookaburras, lorikeets and Grey Butcherbird. But here are some of those who deigned to stay for a while in order for me to dig through the debris and find our camera...

First up, the Eastern Water Dragons. This is a female and although well over three foot long not the largest we've had parading about the drive. There is a particularly enormous and red-bellied male with extremely long claws that I feel it is better to avoid...

Our neighbours have complained that the Dragons use their swimming pools as a toilet but I am glad that they feel comfortable enough to use the local amenities.

Secondly, the King Parrots. A pair of them come daily to sit in one of the trees by our balcony but I seem to be the only person to have seen them. My mother spent a week refusing to believe that they existed, insisting daily that they must have been Lorikeets and looking at me askance every time I mentioned them. Well, Mother, here's proof  for you.

This is a female. The male is gaudier, with a head entirely red. It refused to pose for me but I am sure we will get better acquainted.

Finally, the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos. Apparently I am not supposed to feed them because they attack the timber of people's houses with their all-powerful beaks and most of our house is in fact wooden...Nevertheless, as they are coming closer daily I think I shall be able to tempt them to perch on the balcony for a bit of banana...

The stance and expression of the following cockatoo manages to somehow encapsulate how I currently feel after nine days of cleaning: crazed, blurry and more than a little bit harried. Once I have settled into life in the wilds I shall be back with more. But for now, I shall go and try to deal with Sniff's constant bewilderment about why the hell he has been plonked into the middle of the bush just when he'd made a great success of city living. It's just not fair his eyes say to me as another dragon scuttles past and the whiff of possum breezes by and he doesn't know which way to scarper...























P.S. One day later and I have managed to capture the male King Parrot pecking away at my sunflower seeds (albeit by crappy phone camera, but still). It doesn't do justice to his magnificent gaudy splendour but I am so pleased at my success in enticing him closer that I am posting it anyway...By the way, the greedy bastard has demolished half the seeds in just one day...

Flying Foxes

Things I like about Sydney No. 10: The Botanical Gardens Pt. 4

Early on, in the first few weeks of being here in Sydney, when Daniel and I were staying in a rather luxurious apartment in Surry Hills and I was getting used to the life I wasn't about to lead, one of our most unexpected moments occurred when walking down neighbouring Oxford Street at dusk.  (As a digression, before I tell you what this astonishing occurrence was, there needs to be some etymological explanations for those back home in London. After all...firstly, for goodness sakes, you'll be asking yourself, can't the Australians come up with their own place and street names? And secondly, if they are going to poach ours can't they at least spell them bloody correctly? Surry Hills? Where's the frigging 'e'? (oops, they swallowed it all at Mardi Gras...) Surry Hills does have some residual similarity to our dear old county Surrey in that it boasts some ridiculously over-priced boutiques frequented by people with more money than sense. There is also an air of Home Counties wafting about: tattoos are definitely verboten (rather than de rigeur) and no-one would bat an eyelid if you decided to canter down the main street on a smart looking horse. As for neighbouring Oxford Street it is the spitting image of London's. Similarly tawdry, similarly derided in the national and local press, and similarly long. Nevertheless, isn't it time Sydney just had an enormous re-naming ceremony?) Anyways, back to the point. As we walked down Oxford Street in search of somewhere to eat we looked up into the lowering sky (it was about to rain) only to see hundreds of enormous bats flying past, classically silhouetted against the waning moon. We were in a Hammer Horror movie and it was magical.

Later I found out that these bats are not in fact bats. They are flying foxes. And they spend most of their time roosting in the Botanic Gardens wreaking havoc upon venerable trees. If you go down there during the day this is what you see (and smell....)

hundreds upon hundreds of restlessly sleeping, intermittently squawking, to high-heaven reeking flying foxes. And what we witnessed on Oxford Street was their nightly migration in search of food (fruit, not blood...).

They are causing endless problems to the Botanic Gardens and there are subsequent endless discussions about what to do with them. It seems that there is a new solution posited every week in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Personally, I hope that they take over the world. There is nothing better of a night that to look up into the sky and see an enormous flying mammal. One with extraordinary skills. Every time I do so (and that's most nights, what with the ever-demanding Sniff pleading for midnight walks) it gives me a thrill. It's Dracula and Christopher Lee and exotic nights and palm trees and diversity and extraordinariness and everything good about Sydney.

Bring on the bats.

The Wollemi Pine

Things I like about Sydney No. 9: The Botanic Gardens Pt. 3

When we first went to the Botanical Gardens almost a year ago now the most exciting discovery plant-wise was the mysterious Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis). This so-called 'living fossil' was re-discovered in a dark and damp rainforest gorge only fifteen years ago and this merely 200 km away from here at an unspecified location in the Blue Mountains. One of the world's oldest and rarest trees with only a hundred or so specimens known to exist in the wild the Wollemi Pine belongs to a plant family which has to have the largest amount of vowels in a single word known to lexicography - Araucariaceae. It looks somewhat like a conifer having dark green leaves with serrated edges and lots of branches. As it ages its bark starts to look like bubbling chocolate. The oldest known Wollemi Pine fossil dates back 90 million years and it is believed that the Pines may have existed since the Jurassic period 200 million years ago. Before the Pine was rediscovered in 1994, it was presumed extinct for around two million years.

Now, however, at the little shop in the Botanical Gardens you can buy your own Wollemi Pine and in so doing help conserve those wild specimens. What is more, your new living fossil can be grown in a pot (useful for those of us without gardens..). What is even better is that Daniel bought one for my birthday and it subsequently became this year's Christmas Tree...

It may look small at the moment, but with due care and attention it will reach 20 metres...

Our Wollemi Pine came with a little brochure on how to look after it, the marketing redolent of that accompanying those computer dogs or i-phone girlfriends. It has certainly made me regard it as something more than a plant. The tinsel and baubles have now been carefully removed, the single (Christmas pudding) decoration packed away for next year and the starfish that graced the top hung up in my studio. Our living fossil is now next the front door looking 200 million years old and 200 million years wise.

Re-reading the accompanying literature has reminded me that I have to re-pot it before the biodegradable pot it came in disintegrates on us. It's a ticking timebomb, a cardboard explosion waiting to happen, especially in the ridiculous heat we are enduring this weekend - the sort of heat where Sniff lies with all four limbs in the air trying to get a breeze across his belly and I just wilt on the chaise longue groaning about the injustice of having to live here.

The Botanical Gardens' own specimen of the Wollemi Pine seems a little sickly, or at least it did last time I saw it, lonely on a lawn. I am hoping that with the boosting of their funds from our Wollemi purchase it will receive renewed care and attention. I am also hoping that one day I will learn the secret hiding place of those 100 remaining wild trees and be able to go and see them, undercover, on a sort of covert mission, perhaps bearing some baubles and tinsel to spruce them up a bit. (Ho Ho).

Anyway, as they say at the Botanical Gardens, buying a Wollemi Pine doesn't just help protect the species it will also safeguard its continued survival. So I'd like you all to go out and buy one today. Save the Wollemi Pine!