Four unusual Australian animals to spot in your garden before summer is out

Your lawn might not enjoy the summer, but there’s plenty of Australian wildlife that does. In urban backyards across the country, you can spot native wildlife that appreciates the hot weather.

Some visitors are conspicuous seasonal guests, while others require you to be a bit more observant. Here are a few to look out for before the temperatures cool off – although many are much easier to hear than to see, so keep your ears and eyes peeled.

Parasitic storm birds

Channel-billed cuckoo. Bilby/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

If you live in the north or east of Australia you may have noticed migratory Channel-billed cuckoos (Scythrops novaehollandiae) or Common Koels (Eudynamys scolopacea) descending on your suburb. Often referred to as “storm birds”, they turn up in summer to breed, then head back to New Guinea and Indonesia around March.

Channel-billed cuckoos make their presence known with raucous, maniacal crowing and squawking at all times of the day and night. And the incessant, worried-sounding calling of the Common Koel doesn’t win many fans, especially if you have one camped outside your bedroom window!

The koel’s distinctive call.

Both birds are parasitic cuckoos, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests and then leaving the host bird to raise the cuckoo chicks as their own. Cuckoo chicks grow faster than the host’s brood, demanding all of the food, and the host chicks often starve. To avoid being discovered and kicked out of the nest, some cuckoo chicks have even evolved to look very similar to the young of their host. If all goes according to plan, the adult host birds will rear a healthy brood of fledglings … the only problem is, they’re not theirs.

Keep a close eye on any magpie, crow or currawong nests in your area and see if you can spot the imposters' fledglings. And maybe buy some earplugs.

Carnivorous marsupials

Eastern Quoll. Rexness/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In summer, newly independent (and hungry) quolls venture out on their own. These skilled nocturnal hunters feed on a variety of insects, frogs, small lizards and sometimes even possums and gliders. The backyard chicken coop also presents an attractive option to this cat-sized marsupial carnivore.

The particular species in your neighbourhood will depend on where you live. The Western quoll or chuditch (Dasyurus geoffroii) lives in Australia’s southwest; Northern quolls (D. hallocatus) are found in the tropics; Eastern quolls (D. viverrinus) are restricted to Tasmania; and along the east coast are the Tiger or Spotted-tail quolls (D. maculatus).

Unfortunately, and probably due to loss of habitat, predation by feral cats, and perhaps because some populations eat toxic cane toads, quolls have suffered severe range contractions. So if you are lucky enough to have these backyard visitors, it is truly a privilege.

While in some places they are maligned as cold-blooded poultry-killers, quoll-proofing your chicken coop with mesh wire should prevent raiding. To catch a glimpse, venture out quietly after dark with a torch.

Unassuming garden skinks

Blue-tongued lizard. Esa/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Do you hear rustling sounds as you walk past a garden bed? Or see a metallic flash as something dives off a sunny rock into a pile of leaf litter?

During summer we’re inundated with snake warnings from the media. But all of our native reptiles (not just snakes) become more active as temperatures rise, and you probably have a variety of skinks in your backyard relishing the warmer weather.

Skinks are amazingly diverse, ranging from the multitude of small, garden skinks (such as Lampropholis) to the well-known Blue-tongued lizard (Tiliqua scincoides). You can find them scurrying through leaf litter, basking on rocks, and sitting on fences and tree trunks – but never too far from cover.

Striped skinks (Ctenotus) are fast, efficient predators of all kinds of invertebrates. In fact, skinks are largely insectivorous, and thus are great natural pest controllers.

Grab a reptile field guide to work out which skink species are in your area. If you want to entice more skinks into your backyard, add some clumping native grasses, rocks, logs and leaf litter to your garden.

Australia’s largest butterflies

Queenslanders might be able to spot Australia’s biggest butterfly in their backyard. JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In certain parts of Queensland, summer brings one of the most delicate, spectacular backyard visitors: the Birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera).

Far north Queensland is home to the Cairns Birdwing (O. priamus euphorion), the largest butterfly in Australia. From Maryborough to the New South Wales border you will find Richmond’s Birdwing (O. richmondia), which is slightly smaller but just as impressive.

Australia’s largest butterfly, the Cairns Birdwing.

Throughout summer you might witness a Birdwing’s mating dance, in which the female flies slowly from place to place and the male hovers above her. Females lay their eggs on the underside of native Dutchman’s pipe vines. If you have these plants in your garden, inspect them closely for short, fat caterpillars with insatiable appetites (they will probably eat all the leaves on your entire vine!). Make sure you have the native Dutchman’s pipe vine, as an introduced South American species called Aristolochia elegans is toxic to Birdwings.

These critters are just a few examples of the wildlife you might see in your yard. All kinds of native wildlife respond to the changing seasons. So if you’d like to find out what’s happening in your backyard this summer, get out there and take a look!