May 3, 2010

My ringers didn’t come home until after 7:00 last night. Long day, considering they left at 5:00 am. They came home caked in mud and dust. I guess they spent the day inoculating cattle, and also, at some point along the way hit a pig with the truck. I asked why they didn’t bring it home for me, and Jet told me that wild pig meat was decidedly not good eating. This seems strange to me, as I believe the story with the pigs in Australia is that Captain Cook released them upon intervals along his travels so that any shipwrecked men would have a source of food. These days, there are professional pig hunters whose sole purpose is to ‘control’ the pig problem. Long Island, where I worked in the WhitSundays, had a resident wild pig that was far bigger than I was.

I haven’t posted an update on my toilet in a while… The pipes connecting the tank and bowl are so jammed up with frogs that no longer works at all. For a time, the toilet was working perfectly at around 3:00 am, presumably because the frogs had all vacated it for their nocturnal ramblings. This is very upsetting. The fact that the toilet worked was one of the key benefits to the cooks schedule ( I have to have the fixings for lunch laid out and breakfast ready by 4:30 am).

Today's picture is of a cane toad.



I took this picture under one of our spotlights... The cane toads gather under them because the flies are attracted to light, and they know the eating is good. Some nights you can see as many as 20 of them under one light. Cane toads, much like pigs, are not indigenous to Australia. They were introduced in the early part of the 20th century to combat a beetle that was eating the sugar cane. Unfortunately, they proved to have no interest in eating said beetles. Equally unfortunately, they are extremely prodigious breeders. The government encourages people to kill cane toads whenever possible: they officially advise putting them in the freezer for a couple of days so they freeze to death, and then burying them. However, most people seem to prefer disposing of their cane toads through two sports: Cane Toad Cricket and Cane Toad Golf. Guess how they’re played.

Just to show you how big and ugly these critters are, here's another picture of one I found online.



(Some kids keep them as pets).