Backyard Visitors

One of the great things about living in Perth is the abundant wildlife in the area.  Some of the wildlife is nice and some is nasty.  We get visitors of both varieties on a fairly regular basis in our backyard.  Here are some of our regular backyard guests.

 Fred and Wilma.  We're not sure if they're doves or pigeons.  They are pink and quite pretty and visit our bird bath at least once a day, in the morning, although we've also seen them later in the day also.  In this picture there are 3 birds but normally there are just the couple.  How do we know that they are a male and female?  Well, let's just say that they aren't shy.

We get all sorts of little lizards in our backyard.  Not sure what this one is but he's smaller than my pinky and was just hanging out with us on one cool morning soaking up the warmth from the sun.  When we first moved in we found about half a dozen little Geckos throughout the house (inside) but we haven't seen any since the summer.  We don't mind having these guys around as they eat bugs.

Speaking of bugs, there are a lot of them.  In the summer there are flies galore.  In the fall we get thousands of little centipedes all over the place.  Crickets are quite common.  Also, there are these little beetles that are everywhere for a few weeks.  One of the other common 'guests' are spiders.  There are many spiders here; some large, some small, some harmless and others dangerous.  In the picture above, this is a dead spider, beside my finger for scale.  Believe it or not, this isn't a particularly dangerous variety, although, I'm sure it wouldn't feel very good to be bitten by it.

And then there are the visitors that are actually invited.  This is the neighbours dog "Archie" that Keva will occasionally take for a walk and sometimes bring to our house to hang out.  There are a lot of dogs in the neighbourhood and most of them are very well behaved.  Our back yard is open from the front of the house so we tend to get a lot of our neighbours dogs running through our yard (and occasionally leaving a land mine).

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We've been trying to explore as much around us as we can to learn about the area, become acclimitized and have some new experiences.  We've really only gone 'away' on one trip to the Gold Coast of Australia.  The rest of our trips have been fairly local, i.e. within 1 hour of Perth.  We've been south to Rockingham and Penguin Island.  We've been north to Yanchep and the caves.  We've been east to the hills of Perth but we haven't been west yet to the top tourist attraction in the area: Rottnest Island.  In the meantime, here's what we've been up to recently:

 Climbing some red rocks in an area called John Forrest National Park in Mundaring just east of the city.  This is actually a waterfall without any water.  It was dry when we took the picture about 3 weeks ago.  Now, with the rain we've had, I'm sure a river runs through it.  The area is very Australiana with it's bushland and red and green landscape.

 

 Here are the boys walking through an old rail tunnel in the same park as the picture above.  The tunnel was about 500 meters.  Despite it being a bright and sunny day once we were in the middle of the tunnel it was so dark we couldn't see our own feet for where to step.  All we could see was the pinprick of light ahead of us and behind.  It's a very unnerving feeling. 

 The primary wine region of Western Australia is about 3 hours south of Perth in the Margaret River area.  However, there are still some local wineries just outside the city in the 'Swan' region.  Nadia and I spent a day visiting an area about 30 minutes outside of Perth that housed about 40 wineries.  We even managed to go to a free tasting although most of the wineries were charging for it.

Just yesterday Nadia and I went to Lesmurdie Falls just east of Perth.  It is a wild pocket of nature surrounded by suburbs.  We hiked for about 2 hours and then stopped for lunch.  It was a very picturesque locale despite being surrounded by an industrial park.