Wildlife crossing!

What? To Australia? But there are the world's most poisonous animals! That's how some friends, relatives, and acquaintances reacted when they found out that we wanted to go to Australia for a year. However, since it is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be a victim of an Australian inland taipan - the world's most poisonous snake - for most of us, this topic was not really controversial. Only Aurel expressed his strong concerns about crocodiles and box jellyfish until shortly before departure, but since we have been here, he has mainly experienced the Australian wildlife as cute and fluffy (quokkas) or beautiful, colorful, and paradisiacal (parrots).

On Rottnest Island, a small island near Perth, there are miniature kangaroos that exist nowhere else in the world: the quokkas. The island owes its name to the Dutch explorer who landed there in the 17th century and mistook the small animals for rats, hence the whole island being called 'Rattennest', or Rottnest. The fluffy creatures are not shy and captivate tourists completely, selfies with the cute quokkas are very trendy.

On the island, you can also see a colony of sea lions. But we were really amazed when one of these sea lions, which can weigh up to half a ton, appeared at our surf beach and happily went fishing among us surfers!

However, the first pleasant encounter with wildlife in Australia was not with quokkas or sea lions, but with cockatoos and parrots, which fly around here every day. I still remember the first week of school when I accompanied Aurel to class and got extremely excited during cross-country training because two rainbow lorikeets landed on the tree above us. They are beautiful to look at, but their voice sounds far less paradisiacal!

We met our first kangaroos at Caversham Wildlife Park, where you can touch and feed the friendly animals like in a petting zoo. It would be less advisable to do this in the wild, as male kangaroos can become quite uncomfortable if you enter their territory. On the way home from the wildlife park, we saw wild gray western Australian kangaroos for the first time, coming out of the protective thickets to graze in the evening.

And now to the unpleasant encounters. When I saw the wide selection of cockroach baits and bug sprays at the local grocery store, I took a deep breath and put both the baits and the spray in the shopping cart. Just in case! Rene, the cockroach officer, had to come twice so far. In the meantime, the amount of baits in the house has been drastically increased, and no cockroach has been spotted anymore!

The second unpleasant wildlife encounter took place on Good Friday at the beach, where we wanted to conduct an Easter nest suitability inspection on behalf of the Easter Bunny. The storm the night before, which actually made our house shake, had washed up quite a lot of seaweed - and among it were strange blue plastic bags with a long dark blue string. After some internet research, I identified the objects as Portuguese man o' war, jellyfish that belong to the genus of sea blisters and allegedly feel like touching hot iron. Reason enough to do the Easter egg hunt comfortably in our own garden!