this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.
When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You'll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.
But if you're headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you'll spot the almighty and much maligned "bin chicken", our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you'll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that's not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.
Seeing the flying foxes around Sydney surprised me.
The bin chickens, I simultaneously felt a little sorry for, and enjoyed watching.
The bin chickens are my kin, I'm in the small minority here who appreciate them.
And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They're also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they're just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It's a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they're not dangerous.
People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It's understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you're someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.
There is more and more budgies in big european cities. Some espace there cages, reproduced and live now among pigeons and sparrows. I was surprised to see they could live in region where the winter go bellow -5°C for weeks.
Austrian lorrikeets and rosellas will still surprised and amazed me though.