If we can’t handle a few noisy frogs in the backyard, how can we expect to share our environment with other special creatures? Photo: Supplied.
The veggie patch may not be thriving this year – my tomatoes and cukes have stubbornly refused to grow beyond sad, tiny stalks – but our garden is bursting with life of a different variety.
It’s easy to get excited about saving platypus and koalas, but it can be a lot more difficult to muster up enthusiasm for the creatures we share a habitat with.
They’re the ones we get to spend the most time with, however, and they’re also the lives we can have the biggest personal impact on.
At home, the clutch of baby praying mantis on my feijoa tree have not died out after all.
One of them has clearly devoured the rest, and reappeared bigger and stronger on its favourite top branch.
Brutal, yes, but I can’t help appreciating its majestic posing every time I go out to inspect my burgeoning fruit.
In among the sorrel and rocket a tiny jumping spider has taken up residence and (I believe) feasted on the caterpillars that were previously giving me so much trouble.
The giant skink that lives under our back step has recently been seen sunning itself alongside a miniature friend – we’re guessing a baby.
A slightly-neglected paddle pool has lured back a pair of Peron’s tree frogs that went missing last summer. We’ve spotted some tiny eggs attached to our watercress.
White cabbage butterflies abound, sadly, although I’m sure they’re good for something. More excitingly, some blue triangle butterflies (my favourite) have started popping in to visit a flowering mystery vine on the back fence.
I love watching my tiny friends go about their lives just outside the back door, but living with them requires compromise.
We plant a wide variety of flowering plants, and try to prioritise natives.
I lose more of my veggies to birds and bugs than I would like.
I let things such as basil, coriander and lettuce go to seed and just kind of hang out looking leggy and flowery and messy until they die.
We have a paddling pool that’s always got some water and rocks in it. I am engaged in an ongoing battle to make sure it doesn’t become a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and sometimes I lose.
Frogs are noisy and they don’t keep a 9-5 schedule.
One of my favourite things about Australia is the abundance and variety of wildlife that finds a way to survive not just in pockets of bush but right inside our cities and towns.
Since 1985, amphibian species in Australia have become 97 per cent less abundant, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
There have been significant declines in insect, bird and mammal populations too.
Living with them can be inconvenient. It involves dozens of small compromises every day, from the caterpillars eating your kale to the bat poo that strips paint off your car.
Living without them would be tragic.
If we can’t find a way to live with the wildlife that has adapted to live with us, we’ve got Buckley’s of finding a way to live with creatures that are more sensitive or needy – like platypus and koalas.
Original Article published by Zoe Cartwright on Region Canberra.
