The Daily Boomerang

My wife and I had a surprise this morning when we found out we have a new resident in our backyard:

I have blogged before how I live next to some adjacent bushland inhabited by a mob of kangaroos and now one of them has decided my backyard is good place to get some chow:

We have been watering our grass with the gray water from the washing machine which keeps our grass greener then what this kangaroo is probably used to eating out in the bush where it has been quite dry the last month and a half. The kangaroo is actually doing me a favor because I may not have to mow my grass at the rate he is eating my grass.

My wife and I were watching him from our kitchen window and he decided to hop on over and see what we were doing:

He took off later on in the day when my wife went outside to drive off in her car and the kangaroo got scared from the car noise. However, it will be interesting to see if the kangaroo decides to come back or not because he still has plenty of grass to eat to save me from doing some lawn mowing.

As the heavy rains continue to fall in Victoria they actually got so heavy where I live in the Melbourne area that my rain gutters could not keep up.  They over flowed and the cascading water was flowing down my living room window and seeping through the frame of the window.  My wife and I had to put a bucket and towel at the base of the window to drain the water into:

It was a bit annoying having to keep emptying the bucket, but it is a small price to pay to have all this much needed rain to fall.  I do have to say it is amazing to watch the transformation my yard and garden are going through because of all this rain.  This is what my back yard usually looks like in the summer:

Last summer it rain so little everything was brown and dead.  Now this is what my back yard looks like this summer:

My garden even has flowers blooming again because of the rain:

Last summer I had a small fern tree in my front garden dry up and die.  This is what the small fern tree looked like two winters ago:

This is what it looks like now:

I thought last summer when it dried up it was completely dead.  However, if you look closely in the above picture you can see the fern is coming back to life:

It is amazing how quickly the Australian environment can change once adequate amounts of water have been added to it.  For me at least it looks like even more rain is going to be on the way as more storm clouds gather over my house:

I just hope I don’t have to put out any more buckets today. 

Near my home their is jogging path adjacent to some nearby bush land where often I can see kangaroos lounging around in the field:

My wife and I have lived in Australia for nearly a year and a half and I can still remember how excited we were to see our first kangaroo.  We pulled the car over and stopped along the side of the road for about ten minutes to watch kangaroos hopping around in a field.  Our Aussie friends said we would eventually get sick of seeing them, but you know what we still love seeing the kangaroos and are not sick seeing them yet:

In fact my wife and I love kangaroos so much that we even invite them over for dinner, as the main course:

I have talked about this before, but kangaroo meat is outstanding if you know how to cook it.  My wife figured out how to marinate the meat properly and when we grill the meat it is fantastic eating.  We still love looking at kangaroos, but after eating a few of them we probably won’t ever look at a kangaroo in quite the same way. 

Mooselet started a blogging challenge to Google Earth where you live here in Australia.  Well here is where I live in northern Melbourne:

I don’t live on any beach front property or on top of some mountain; my neighborhood is just like any other suburban neighborhood you will find here in Australia.  My house is an L shaped home with a garage and a large backyard which you can see pictures of here.  What I like most about my neighborhood is that it borders bushland with a number of walking trails where you can easily see mostly kangaroos and emus along with other Aussie wildlife.  I also like that my house is only about 7 kilometers from the Hume Highway which means I can head north to the mountains pretty easily from where I live.

I rent my home and the way the rental system here in Australia works is that you pay rent by the fortnight or in other words every two weeks.  So every fortnight I pay AU$397 dollars which isn’t to bad for a four bedroom home with a garage.  I wouldn’t buy the house I’m currently in, but I’m am actually thinking of buying a home down here at some point depending on future plans, if I can find the right place, and the strength of the US dollar. 

The rain this past winter and the subsequent recent sunshine has caused my backyard to look the best it has ever since I moved down here to Australia:

To put how good my yard looks now into perspective take a look at how bad it looked just a few months ago:

My yard was so dead about 6 months ago that I did not need to even bother cutting it any more.  Anything that managed to grow were quickly gobbled up by the cockatoos. 

Anyway, the weather was beautiful and I decided to spend the day working on my yard.  The recent sunshine this past week has caused my grass to grow as high and as thickly as it has ever been since I’ve lived down here.  I had the empty the bin on my lawnmower of grass clippings six times. I don’t mind though because my yard is really looking good. 

I did have a mishap though today while lawnmowing.  Near my mailbox is a small pipe with a nosel on it that is used to shut off the main water line to my house.  The grass around the pipe was so high I did not see the pipe and clipped it with my lawnmower.  Water shot out of it and hit me square in the face.  Fortunately none of my neighbors were out in their yards because they would of have died of laughter if they would have saw that happen.  I quickly cut the water supply to my house and called the plumber and fortunately one was working on a Sunday.  The plumber was at my house in under an hour and had it repaired in about 20 minutes. What could have been quite a disaster ended up being not that big of deal since the plumber fixed it so quickly. 

Here is a look at my garden in my front yard:

I have a few flowers blooming in the garden and around the house I have what I assume is a weed blooming, but it is actually quite beautiful:

Just another eventful day working in the yard. 

One of the nice things about living in Australia are the birds.  Compared to the United States, Australia just has a wide variety of colorful birds.  Here of some of the birds that most frequently come and hang out in our yard:

Cockatoos are without a doubt our most frequent visitors.  The love hanging out in the trees in my yard and in the morning they like to make a ruckus.  They are very noisy birds, which used to annoy me when I first came to Australia, but now they are my favorite bird here.  These cockatoos are about the size of a chicken and are very intelligent.  I actually know someone who has a pet cockatoo and he was able to teach it to speak English.  The clarity of it’s English was amazing.  He trained it to say "G’day Mate!", "See ya Later!", and "No Worries!" to name a few.  

My wife buys seeds from Safeway for the cockatoos to eat so they really love hanging out in our yard:

As you can also see in the above picture we have a number of pigeons that hang out in yard as well, and the cockatoos love picking on them and chasing them around the yard.  The cockatoos really are a bunch of clowns when you sit and watch them.

Here are some lorikeets that also like to frequent our yard:

That are a variety of species of lorikeet that visit our yard both these guys are definitely the most common.  Here is by far the biggest birds that come to hang out in our yard:

During the summer when the bush starts running short on water and grass to graze on the emus along with the kangaroos will start moving through the community eating food in the grass around the houses.  The emus are large, and harmless and usually just walk away when approached.  Really ugly birds, but I have taken a liking to them too. 

Since it has moved into autumn here in Australia the emus and kangaroos haven’t been hanging out in yard for quite some time now.  However, we have some new visitors I haven’t seen before:

These two species of birds I have never seen before, but have been hanging out in my yard recently.  I’m guessing they are migrating from possibly Tasmania to a warmer climate further north in maybe Queensland.  I looked in my wildlife book, but couldn’t determine what these birds are.  They are pretty birds though so hopefully they stay and continue to hang out for a while. 

Speaking of spring, my yard has really taken a turn for the better with the all the rain we have been getting down here in Victoria lately.  Take a look at my backyard, it is almost all green now:

Additionally we even have a rose bush blooming now as well:

Victoria is really weird with it’s seasons compared to the states.  Here in the fall many flowers start blooming while in the spring and summer they die.  The rains of the fall and winter time here causes all the plants to come back to life after the dry summer that scorches everything.  Our backyard and flowers are looking good, but my frontyard is still mostly brown and looks about the same from my last update on it.  Hopefully another month of rain will turn that around and maybe my fern tree will come back to life. 

It’s strange, but after all the heat and bushfires of the past summer, I’m actually looking forward to winter.  Bring it on. 

This what my flower garden looked like before summer arrived here in Australia:

During the winter and spring here Victoria received plenty of rain which caused my yard to be mostly green and the flowers to bloom.  Now in the middle of the hot, dry Aussie summer it is quite a different story:

As you can see my grass is a dead brown and the purple flowers that bloomed are gone.  Notice my fern has completely dried up and died.  Due to water restrictions we cannot water our yard or garden.  The best my wife and I could do is use water from the washing machine to give to the garden.  This water has been able to allow us to prevent a complete disaster of our garden as you see there are still a few flowers blooming.  My grass is so dead now that the kangaroos won’t even eat any more.  You’ll have to take my word for this, but if the kangaroos won’t eat then that is some really dead grass.

Here is a picture of a spectacular Aussie sunset from my backyard. 

We had some unexpected guests today at the Outback Dobbs household:

This emu and it’s baby were out in our front yard eating away.  The emus have been coming into our neighborhood from the surrounding bush looking for food.  I really don’t mind them.  They are fun to look at despite being one of the ugliest birds in the animal kingdom. 

However, their babies are cute though:

What is interesting about the emus is that the father takes care of the offspring.  After the mother lays her eggs she takes off to look for another male emu to hang out with while the male sits on the eggs.  The male will sit on the eggs for eight weeks until they hatch, only surviving off of it’s body fat.  Once the eggs are hatched the father will continue to take care of the chicks.  The father defends the chicks and teaches them how to look for food.  The father will take care of the chicks for about 18 months and then they are ready to go off on their own.  I have actually seen an emu taking care of nine chicks before.  While the dad is walking along I counted nine little chicks following him like ducks in a row.  I wish I had my camera on me that day because it was pretty cool. 

This emu that pop up in my front yard had only this one chick with him.  I walked outside to take pictures of them and the large emu came head right to me.  This emus are large animals so I backed away from him and he kept coming at me.  I backed off all the way to my front door and he kept coming at me. 

Here is the emu walking up the drive way towards me; you can see the baby emu just to his right:

I stepped inside the house and he walked up to the front door and just looked at me and then walked back down the drive way.  It seemed like he was just curious, but it is a large wild animal so I wasn’t about to go and try to pet it or anything.  The two of them hung out in my yard for about 10 minutes before taking off again.  The one bad thing about emus though is that they leave almost cow paddy like crap when they need to go.  It is a pain in the butt to clean if they crap on the drive way because we can’t use water to clean our drive way because of the water restrictions.  So I have to wait until it dries and then take a rake to it to break it up and then sweep it away. 

However, it is a small inconvenience to pay for the chance to see one of Australia’s unusual animals. 

Housing here in Australia is in general very good.  Many homes in Victoria are made of brick like mine pictured below:

This is a view of our home from the backyard.  Our home has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large living room, and a gigantic kitchen.  Also notice I have a small single vehicle garage.  However, what I like the best about our home is the huge backyard we have.

It is still winter time here so most of my yard is yellow but I still have to mow about once every three weeks.  I bought a nice mower here for $289AUS, which comes out to about $220US.  Hopefully it will last me awhile.  I know it is going to be busy while I’m living here in Australia with the size of the yard I have to mow.

My wife actually planted some onions in the yard and they have actually grown even in the winter.  To the left of the picture you can see the huge gum tree I have in my yard.  The most annoying thing about the gum tree is that during the winter it sheds it’s bark.  Yes, it’s bark.  Gum trees keep their leaves all year round and only shed their bark during the winter.  So I have to rake up bark every time I mow as well.  Small price to pay for finally having a nice yard after living in apartments all these years. Here is the large garden I have been working on making for my wife:

It is still a work in progress, but I still have time because it is still winter here.  I need to get some wood to frame it and keeping working on pulling out the weeds.  You can see the piles off weeds I pulled out already in this picture.  I’ll keep everyone updated on garden progress through the spring.  Wish me luck.