Wildlife Encounters

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A couple of days ago we tiredly climbed down from the motorhome to go into a roadhouse at Kimba for a soft drink. Barry heard a loud voice calling, "Hello, hello!". He went looking and found a large white cockatiel in a large pen. It's ability to talk is amazing. Soon it was saying,"Hello, puppy!" and, when we walked away it threw a bit of a temper tantrum. The lady in the roadhouse told us that Cocky is eighty (yes, EIGHTY) years old. His cage used to face the highway but he got too stressed out from all the tourists. Now his pen faces away from the road. Apparently over the years tourists have found it hilarious to teach Cocky swear words. A young, 25 yr. old truck drive was horrified to hear the bad language Cocky spewed out because he himself is quite religious. Now, at regular 2-month intervals, the truck driver stops by as he's traveling down the road. He sits outside the cage for fifteen minutes and reads to Cocky from the Bible - and apparently Cocky listens very respectfully.

There is a mouse epidemic in many communities we traveled through. There has been rain to encourage flourishing of their numbers. Now, since the grain crops have been taken off the fields the mice have no food and they're moving into the little towns and even into campervans in caravan parks. Wherever we went we saw signs warning that poison has been set down to control mice. One evening, as we were having dinner in a nice roadhouse restaurant a big mouse ran along the floor near us. Obviously he hadn't read the sign.

Yesterday as we traveled near Morgan, South Australia, we literally ran into a cloud of large grasshoppers. It was disgusting; millions of them were pinging off the windshield and smashing as they hit. The noise of them hitting was so loud and the windshield was a mess. We drove for more than an hour and could barely see out but there was no place to stop and nothing to clean the windshield with anyway. Every other vehicle on the road was covered in dead bodies. We finally got to a town where I was told this was the worst grasshopper plague in over thirty years! They've had them for almost a week now. This morning we took the motorhome to a car wash (there happens to be water in this town) and Barry managed to chisel most of the bodies off with the power wash. After we left town (with the nice, shiny clean M/H) we hit more, to a lesser extent. We traveled for another three hundred km with quite a few hitting us. By the way, dead grasshoppers don't smell nice.

To end the animal stories for today: we saw several more emus today. There are often fences keeping wildlife off the highway but in two instances today the emus were on the highway side of the fence. I guess they don't read either.

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Photos

Cocky
Cocky is calling us back as we walk away.

Grasshopper Grunge
Hard to take a photo but this gives you an idea about what a mess the motor home was.

Fly Swarm
We had to take a photo of this tonight. This is a fly swarm outside a filling station. Yech.