Frogs and a turkey

Spent today in the orchard and vegetable garden, doing some much needed tidying, fertilizing. Picked the first variety of the citrus season, Calomondins for marmalade. In the vegetable garden found a couple of frogs for today's blog, the first being a Rocket Frog Litoria nasuta, which as its name implies can launch itself in very long leaps. It is found throughout the north and north-east wet regions of Australia with its southern range in our vicinity. The second was our most prevalent frog the Dwarf Tree Frog Litoria fallax which was perched on the top of a pumpkin. This frog species is quite variable in its colouring, but this particular one was just beautiful, almost iridescent green.
I thought that was going to be it for today's blog, but just on dark as I was closing the garage door a Brush Turkey just wandered past. This is the first that we have seen on our property, although we have heard they were in the area. They are quite interesting large birds and they are generally regarded with a bit of love and hate as they can cause huge problems in gardens.

Brush-Turkeys Alectura lathami  

One of the mound building birds of Australia, the Brush-Turkey (also called Scrub-Turkey) had a distribution from Cape York south to the Illawarra region of NSW. Its range had shrunk north to the far north coast of NSW but with the changes in suburban gardens and an increase in coastal national parks and reserves it is recolonising much of its past range. They are found in rainforests, wet coastal forests and gardens bordering these habitats. The need to build a large mound to incubate their eggs tends to dominate their existence and the mounds can grow to about 6m diameter and up to 2m in height. The female deposits the eggs in holes about .5m deep in the mound and then the male bird is responsible for maintaining the temperature control of the mound to incubate the eggs.

Brush Turkey Qld. 2007