My name is Rebecca and I live on an outer suburban house block in beautiful Brisbane, Australia. While the block isn't all that big, it is steep and terraced and covered with loads of vegetation.

Featuring on the block are five huge tallowood trees, enourmous gum trees that stretch up to 100 feet high (30 m) high. Beneath them are a variety of trees. There are 70 ft (23m) palms, covered in red berries at the moment. A small ficus tree is fighting off our attempts to keep it from becoming all it can be at 60-70 ft tall (20-23m), which is smothered in green berries, that will soon turn to scarlet and attract the birds and critters of the district.

I have the fortune of having my home office window facing this tree, I am on the upper floor, in the mid range of the trees, so my view of the birds here is spectacular. We are also very fortunate here that our birds are all native. We don't see any introduced species.

Amongst the birds we have here are that we see every day are:

Rainbow Lorikeets Trichoglossus haematodus (photo above)
Laughing Kookaburras Decelo novaeguineae (photo below)
Australian Magpies -Gymnorhina tibicen (photo below)
Pied Butcher Birds - Cracticus nigrogularis
Noisy Miners (and they are noisy) Manorina melancephala
Australian Ravens (always called Crows hated by nearly everyone) Corvus coronides

Australian Brush Turkeys (which are supposedly uncommon, but we have a small family) Alectura lathami (photo below)
Crested Pigeon (native pigeon) Geophaps lophotes
Spangled Drongos (brilliant black with a red eye and beautifully fanned tail) Dicurus bracteatus
Black faced Cuckoo shrike Coracine novaehollandiae
Australian King Parrots (magnificent large red fronted parrot) Alisterus scapularis (photo below)
Mopoke Owl aka Southern Boobook (I want to shoot this as it sits outside in a tree all night calling mo-poke or boo-book) - Ninox boobook
Eastern Whipbirds (so called because their long call ends in a sound of a whipcrack) Psophodes olivaceus
Brown Cuckoo Dove? (has a strange loudly echoing call that sounds like whoomph-only heard, never seen) - Macropygia amboinensis
Azure Kingfisher (a tiny but spectacularly coloured bird) Alcedo azurea
Pomarine Jaeger - Stercorarius pomarinus

In addition to the birds are frogs cane toads and butterflies.

Some butterflies are as big as a small bird and the garden is filled with the colours of them all. There are white, yellow, orange, brown, monarchs, ulysses (a spectacular blue edged with black), multicoloured ones and a gigantic black and white variety.

There are lots of lizards too. Skinks and geckos that call out loudly at night as they chase insects on the windows. There are blue tongues and eastern water dragons.

We find green tree frogs on the windows in summer (photo below). There are cane toads, gigantic 2 inch (5cm) Australian land snails that hide in the mulch). There is a massive carpet python, though I've only found his 7ft (2.1m) shedded skin and a green tree snake. Luckily for us, both are non-venemous, though I am sure there are Eastern Browns, Red Bellied Blacks and possibly Coastal Taipans pass through due to our proximity to the water. We also believe there is a bandicoot that digs up the garden and is fond of our sweet pototoes.

10/11 How could I forget the possums!! Cute, big eyes, small feet, incredibly agile at night. We seem to have an army of them. They play hockey on the roof in hobnail boots (at least it sounds that way on our tin roof anyway).

A few weeks ago one found it's way upstairs and made a lot of noise while breaking china ornaments. Poor thing couldn't find it's way out and I found it sitting on the dining room table at around 3am. We got it out the door where it ran over our very startled cat, before throwing itself a tree from the balcony rail, the disappearing in the night.

These photographs (excluding pheasant coucal) are available for sale in high resolution detail (all photographs are typically 8-10 MB). Please contact me for details.

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