A Mother of a Spider
Spiders lay their eggs in silken sacs the shapes of which differ markedly depending on the species of spider. Where the sacs are kept is also species dependent. Some spiders suspend their egg sacs to vegetation, on their webs or on surfaces. Ground Spiders (pictured left) live in crevices in wood or rocks and attach their very thin egg sacs to those surfaces.
Wolf Spiders are one of only a couple of types of spider where the female carries the egg sac with them, pictured right. Female Wolf Spiders attach the spherical sac with a silk line to the spinnerets at the end of the abdomen. The egg sac is carried under the abdomen until the spiderlings are born. When the spiderlings are ready to hatch the spider opens the sac to release them.
The spiderlings are carried around on the mother’s back for the first few weeks of their lives (pictured above). If they become detached the mother will wait for them to climb back on board. During this time the spiderlings do not eat but instead rely on fat reserves within their bodies for sustenance. When those fat reserves are exhausted the young spiders leave to hunt their own food. Unfortunately, some of the first foods are their siblings.
Brings a new meaning to ‘Love your brothers and sisters’.
The Flame of Life
In July, a couple of years ago, I was in Yea’s old Cemetery. In this sombre place of weathered stone and wrought iron, hard soil and lichen, the cemetery’s oldest headstones are in poor condition, contributing to the awareness of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death and decay.
In the brooding heaviness of a grey day in this place, a party of flame robins (Petroica phoenicia) was on the move. Perhaps half a dozen birds, of which 4 at least were males.
The contrast was heart-changing. The mood lifted, the beauty shone, it was like poetry.
To invert the solemn words from the Funeral liturgy, In the midst of death, we find the flame of life.
Handy camping tool – or not?
On our last camping trip the sandy tent area we pulled up at was pitted with unusual crescent shaped holes in the ground – cause UNKNOWN.
Included in our camping kit for the first time was a new gadget, a ‘black light’ (ultraviolet) torch. Why? Because some minerals such as calcite and hyalite (a form of opal) fluoresce under ultraviolet light. And what better way to entertain yourself after the sun goes down than doing a bit of UV fossicking.
Walking around in the dark with the new gizmo we found no fluorescent rocks but noticed that in those crescent shaped holes were creatures that did fluoresce. But they quickly ducked back into their holes before we could make out what they were.
We eventually found a creature out in the open glowing bright blue in the UV light (pictured above). We did not really have to use our white-light torch (pictured right) to identify it as a scorpion.
Scorpions are arachnids (just like spiders). They have eight legs, two large pincers and a tail equip with a sting. No one understands what chemical in the scorpion exoskeleton causes it to fluoresce under UV light. Nor do they understand the reason why scorpions fluoresce at all.
Suffices to say that the UV torch will remain in our camping kit so we can hunt down fluorescent minerals and invertebrates. That is, if we really want to know.
Chicken, duck or goose
One of the best ways to view Australian raptors is simply by driving your car through the countryside. They are invariably hovering stationary above a field, perched on fence posts and powerlines keeping an eye out for unwary prey, or they are on the side of the road feasting on the roadkill.
Unfortunately the latter is why many raptors are killed, also being hit by cars. This is particularly true for Wedge-tailed Eagles that cannot get out of the way quick enough as a car approaches.
I recently encountered a Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), pictured left in the middle of the road feasting on what I assumed was a dead native animal. Upon stopping the Kite flew into a nearby tree. The carrion turned out to be an extremely large form of poultry, pictured below.
Whistling Kites are found in Australia, New Guinea and New Caledonia. They feed on a large range of animals, birds and insects. In summer they hunt live prey but as the weather cools down and there is less food around their diet turns to carrion. People more expert at poultry than I identified the dead bird as a rooster. In this case the carrion was as large as the kite itself. I can only assume that the dead rooster was dropped on the road by a fox.
The dead bird was removed from the road and thrown into a nearby field to avoid a further accident.
One dead bird is enough.
East versus west
Macropus, coming from the Ancient Greek meaning long foot, is a genus of kangaroo of which only 2 of 15 known species still exist. Commonly they are known as grey kangaroos and the existing species are the Western Grey Kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus), pictured left and the Eastern Grey Kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), pictured below. Until recently the Red Kangaroo was considered a sub-genus but has been determined to be sufficiently different to be its own group.
As the name suggests the two species have different ranges. The distribution for the Eastern Grey almost follows the north-south Queensland, NSW, Victoria border and all territory east. The range of the Western Grey extends across southern Australia but stops around the Victorian border and extends north into NSW. So there is overlap in southern NSW.
When photographed together it is relatively easy to tell the two species apart. The Western Grey is browner and smaller with a darker face. But if you a travelling in the Riverina and you see a roo the definitive test is that the Eastern Greys have fur over all their ears whereas the Western Greys only have fur at the base of the ears.
The challenge is to get close enough to tell (without running the animal over!)
Jacky Winter and the Flying Ants
This sounds like a title for a children’s adventure book. It’s really just an observation on some interesting behaviour. The Jacky Winter (Microeca fascinans) is not common around the Strath Creek – Yea district, but is occasionally observed. It is a bird of farmland, woodland, dry scrub. They have no distinguishing marks except the tail has white feathers down each side (which I could not get the bird to flaunt in these photos). In Spring their call goes ‘peter-peter-peter-peter’.
I saw 4 of these birds engaging in typical behaviour recently. They were all sitting on fenceposts and sallying out to catch flying insects then returning to their posts. What was the occasion? It is flying ant time! The air had many flying ants and these insectivorous little robins were loving it.
Once a year at the end of summer, ants and termites produce swarms of winged females and males known as alates, called queens and drones respectively. They come pouring out of the nest and hit the air in a nuptial flight. While in the air, a queen and a drone will clasp each other, and fall to the ground to start a new colony. In termites, this is done by biting off each other’s wings, whereas ant alates keep their wings (but the drones die when their work is done). There are thousands of species of ants and I do not know which species these black ants are. Different species time their flight according to warmth, humidity, day-length; some are spectacular, all are wonderful.
As well as reproducing the colony – only one couple needs to be successful for that!- this proliferation of flying protein is a bumper provision for the ecosystem, feeding all manner of spiders, birds, reptiles, bats, predatory insects.
Sometimes the overproduction of seeds or eggs or alates in nature seems so generous and helpful to other species, it makes one question the view which sees nature as highly competitive and only concerned with survival of the fittest. There is a strong sense of cooperation and mutual care sometimes.
Humans, take note!
Rabbits Digest
A frequent sight on farmland is a patch of rabbit droppings. They have their favourite spots – usually open and clear, often with a nice view across the valley. This site is not simply where they go to be tidy and keep their droppings in one place. They also eat them.
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) employs this method of digestion as their solution to the problem that grass with its high fibre and cellulose is a reluctant contributor to nutrition. Cows and deer solve the problem by chewing the cud. Horses have a long complex digestive tract. Rabbits have kept their small size and nimbleness by eating the grass twice. It is called caecotrophy (or cecotrophy in the US).
The droppings shown in the photos are not the pellets that are eaten. The caecotroph poo is black and covered in mucus and usually eaten immediately. The second time through, the indigestible parts and waste products emerge in the familiar balls that accumulate on the patches and mounds where they sit at night.
Not all rabbits live in the burrow. Older rabbits, especially males, hide out in the grass like hares during the day only scurrying to a burrow when threatened.
But come the night, when the moon is blessing the landscape, each rabbit will graze for a while then move to a dropping mound, sit back, survey the beautiful surroundings and munch on some fresh poo.
Ahh! the serenity!
In black and white
I wish to discuss the way to distinguish the sex of two of our commonest black and white birds and the distinction is conveyed by the arrangement of the black and the white.
Magpie-Lark
Magpie-larks Grallina cyanoleuca, are common enough, often found stalking the verges in pairs making a sweet duet of calls. It is quite easy to pick the male from the female: the male has a black beard and strong white eyebrow. The female has a white face and throat. Males are bolder and for this reason, most of the photos I have of this bird are of the male. I have had to ask for help for a photo of a female.
Australian Magpie (Cracticus tibicens)
It is also more likely that magpie photographs will be of the male with its clear white back – whether the white is confined to the neck nape (as in the Black-backed form) or travels intact down to between the wings (the White-backed form). The rule of thumb is that the White-backed in Victoria is found south of the Dividing range and the Black-backed is found north of it. In Yea we can get both types, but black-backed is more common. See Ron’s post Evolution for more discussion on the different races.
In all the races of magpie, the female has the same pattern of white but her white is mottled, flecked with grey, less distinct.
In the Western race of the magpie found in Perth, the female’s mottled back takes a special form – it looks like a spray of diamonds on a black background.
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Learning the different details of our common birds helps us rediscover their beauty and wonder. Differentiating the sexes isn’t always quite so black and white.
Are you over the Rainbow?
Each October, thousands of Australians participate in Birdlife Australia‘s Great Aussie Birdcount, and each year since it began in 2014, the most commonly reported bird is the Rainbow Lorikeet. Trichoglossus moluccanus is a stunningly beautiful parrot, loud, bold, and easily tamed to come for regular feeding by homeowners. Colourful, small flocks of them streak across the sky in every town, park and woodland.
When I was a child in Melbourne last century, rainbow lorikeets were not ever seen. When I lived on the Murray River in the 1990s, they were rarely seen but gradually increased in appearances. When I came to Yea in 2012, rainbow lorikeets were infrequent visitors. As of 2025, they are common in all those places. This shows that they are native birds who have thrived with the changes we have brought to the environment with our farming and urban landscapes – as have Noisy Miners and Magpies.
This colourful species was not present in Western Australia until they turned up in Perth a couple of decades ago; now their population is over 40,000 and reports that they are out-competing local species for nesting hollows are raising concern. They have recently arrived in Tasmania, and New Zealand has a program to prevent their multiplication there. They have also increased their range along the Eastern seaboard of Australia well beyond their original confines. Some have also established in Hong Kong.
They have some endearing qualities: they are monogamous, pairing for life mostly it seems, they are friendly and very photogenic. Both sexes look alike and they adapt well to aviaries – if you can put up with the screeching. But balancing those endearments, they display some negative qualities – raiding fruit trees, expelling nestlings of other birds so they can take the hollows, and dominating the limited food resources of the bush. The WA Department of Agriculture estimates $3 million damage annually to fruit crops by rainbow lorikeets.
They are adapted to eat nectar, pollen and fruits with a specialised ‘brush tongue’ that scoops out the nectar from within flowers. Trichoglossus means ‘hairy tongue’. (Eeww!)
So what’s the verdict? Pest or prize? Beautiful or bad boy? Are you over the rainbow? For all the problems they cause, it is hard to resist such very pretty faces. I’m grateful to live with them.
Bird Hunters part 3: Stealth assassins
The third type of bird-hunting bird in this series is the stealth hunter. The prime exponents of this method are the goshawks and their close relatives, the sparrowhawks.
Goshawks occasionally soar around above the treetops but they don’t dive on prey from above like the eagles and the larger hawks and kites. Goshawks hunt by ambush, attack without warning, stealth strikes.
Goshawks have sharp eyes, dangerous talons and strong wings that give them great agility, speed and manoeuvrability. They will sit patiently for hours sometimes waiting for a prey species to make themselves vulnerable. It may be a honeyeater drinking at flowers, a pigeon or quail feeding on the ground, or a rodent or reptile. Suddenly the goshawk launches, effortlessly navigating through trees or under bushes and slamming onto the prey with arched feet. They can execute rapid turns, sudden dives, bush crashing, short wild pursuits, a testament to their superb physical design.
They are just as formidable in low-light dawn and dusk with their finely tuned eyesight, and their combination of speed and surprise -often ambushing from a concealed perch – makes them effective deadly hunters. These tactics work in a variety of habitats from dense forest to urban backyard with a few trees, which is why these birds are frequently observed in many places and often photographed.
Once the hunt is successfully completed, the goshawk or sparrowhawk will sit on a patch of open grass, plucking and dismembering the hapless bird, often to the accompaniment of outraged shrieks and chirps from many birds in the neighbourhood, which are blithely ignored. See Ron’s story here
It is famously difficult to tell the difference between the Brown Goshawk (Tachyspiza fasciata) and the Collared Sparrowhawk (Tachyspiza cirrocephalus). Briefly, the BG is larger with a rounded tail, the CS is smaller and finer with a square tail. There are other goshawks and sparrowhawks in Australia but these two are quite common around the district. It is also possible to see the Grey Goshawk (Tachyspiza novaehollandiae) anywhere in Victoria and if one is very lucky the pure white form of this bird may present a fleeting rapturous view.
Focus On Fauna 