Share your space with beautiful creatures by Fred Weight

We have lived just beside the golf course in Foster since 2015. When Alison and I bought the land, there were two remnants of secondary original vegetation growth.

The rest of the property was mown grass.

What must have been a pretty little meandering watercourse on the whole subdivision, had been bulldozed and replaced with a straight channel almost a kilometre long outside the fence on the

neighbouring property.

After this was done, there were no remnant pools, so the platypus do not come any more.

There were still some occasional visits by kangaroos.

The birds were all large birds like magpies, kookaburras, ibis and herons and they did not stay. We saw virtually no little birds. The house was built and we planted lots of native plants. We put a bit of water around. Within a year or so, we had the wattle birds and then the wrens and honeyeaters and parrots, butcherbirds, grey fantails, eastern whip birds and so many more.

They stay and live with us and we enjoy their song. Sometimes when we go into the garden they scold us and are very bossy. We have to remind them that we live here too. It would have been so much better if this subdivision still had the watercourse and the platypus and the ferns and the special places.

Good planning, with wildlife in mind, could have achieved that and it probably would have cost less. We have the kangaroos visit a lot and we have had a koala visit a couple of times. Only a few weeks ago, we had an echidna visit and he found some termite infested wood that he dragged onto the drive and then systematically removed the termites and the ants.

Wildlife will happily live where the conditions are right. We want to have wildlife around, so we will continue to work on that.