OK, hands up - who knows what an antechinus is?
You've possibly met one, and thought it was just a rat. They're both small, furry and brown, but once you see pictures of them you realise they are totally different.
Antechinus are small, pointy-nosed carnivorous marsupials. Definitely carnivorous - my friend, the late Val Plumwood, picked one up. 'What do you eat, little fellow?" The antechinus bit a chunk out of her finger then began to chew it. Yep, it was meat eater.
I spent two hours last week watching an antechinus on the windowsill next to my bed. My reading light attracts bogong moths and the antechinus perched on the ledge, doing great ballet leaps to grab a giant moth, half as big as her, then crunched every bit of it before leaping for another. She must have eaten her bodyweight in two hours. Antechinus are not particularly scared of humans, though that one knew the glass separated us - and she instinctively ducked each time I pressed "video record".
Antechinus, bettongs, bandicoots, water rats, several lizard species, marsupial mice and other small native animals used to be common around Canberra, and you may still find them in some suburbs near reserves or older suburbs with long-established gardens, if you know what to look for, like small holes in the lawn or scats. Four lush years have meant a population explosion of animals I feared we'd lost.
So how do you let wildlife know you'll happily share your garden with them? Firstly, with a garden rich in bushy shrubs, for nesting. Rambling roses are as good as native Bursaria, as are trees with hollows. This needn't be a mighty eucalypt that might fall on the house or invade your sewage pipes - badly pruned peach trees develop hollows in a few years. "I'm preparing a habitat for wildlife", you can say to any expert gardener looking critically at the hollow where a branch has been taken off too close to the trunk, leaving a leafless stump that won't heal and rot has taken hold.
Use live traps for rats and mice. We have the kind where the rat climbs a ramp to find the peanut butter, then falls through the flap into a bucket, leaving the animal to be identified - though not if you half fill it with water so they drown. Feral rats have tails twice as long as their body. Consult Dr Google or a good book to see who you've captured. Getting rid of feral rats and mice is good for native species, as well as humans. The fewer ferals you have, the more chance the marsupials will see your garden as an Eden.
Keep cats indoors as night, when the native hunters are about, or better still, give them a netted "cat garden" so birds are safe, too.
And avoid poisons that kill the caterpillars on your cabbages, the sawfly larvae on your cherry trees, black spot on roses etc. Native species can eat the poisoned pests and die because of it.
Here are two handy recipes that kill anything as well as any poison.
Glue spray: Mix 1 cup of white flour with 1 cup of boiling water. Mix till smooth then slowly add cold water till it's sprayable. Whether they are stink bugs or plague grassshoppers, glued-up pests go nowhere, and the batter coating may make them even tastier. Birds also discover you have the slowest caterpillars etc in the area. A glue-enriched tree does look ugly, but in 12 hours you can wash your plants clean.
Milk spray: For downy mildew, black spot and many other fungal problems. Mix 1 cup pf full-cream milk, 8 cups of water, and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Don't spray this or any oil-based spray when the temperature is over 24C, and some plants can't tolerate any oil at all - especially those "leaf gloss" sprays that looks so tempting. Test any spray on a single leaf before using.
No one can make a fortune out of glue or milk spray, so you won't see them advertised. They're cheap, easy, effective - and only kill their target, while leaving them edible for the predators who do most of your pest control.
Canberra has its grassy hills, horse paddocks and Black Mountain as wildlife refuges. We are also the garden city. With a bit of help, native animals - from echidnas to golden skinks or even antechinus - may decide to share your garden space and enrich your life.
PS: If you want to see gorgeous water rats - more like otters that introduced rats - head to lake Burley Griffin. You may even see a platypus.
This week I am:
- Envying a front fence whose rambling rose bush still has pink blooms on it. I may possibly pluck up the courage to leave a note, asking if I can have a cutting from it - any rose pruning at this time of year can be used to grow a new rose bush.
- Too wimpish to plant onions in the cold this year, though you should. A home-grown onion is sweet and flavourful and this is the time to put them in.
- Tolerating Possum X above the bedroom. After two hours screaming at us when we had a smoky accident in the kitchen, he moved out of the living room roof space and into the loquat tree. He's decided that warmth is better than loquat flowers within paw reach, but still yells at us to make his displeasure known.
- Considering planting more dahlias. I hated them when young, but adore them now. Dahlias rarely die on you, bloom flagrantly for six months of the year, and wallabies only eat them when starving.
- Giving the summer-blooming salvias another week or two for the last of their flowers before whipper-snipping them to ground level before new growth appears.
- Guzzling home-grown citrus, winter apples and Michael's persimmons.
- Glorying in what seems to be a million camellia flowers in various pinks, reds and white.
