Wednesday 6 August 2008

Thanks Kev, not!

I received this letter recently from Ric Montgomery and thought it was worth sharing...

  • Hi Michael, it is with interest and amusement that I read in the Cairns Post about the invasion of the flying foxes.

    I happen to own a private park only a couple of Ks from the CBD, right next door to the botanical gardens as a matter of fact. I have a few stands of paperbarks that are in full bloom.

    By night I have a countless number of huge foxes descending to feed, and believe me, when you can almost grab one as they fly past your verandah, you do realize how big some of them are! From about 5 pm the bombardment starts, these guys make the London blitz seem insignificant, as they rarely miss! Even on the clearest of evenings, one must be equipped with stout hat, umbrella, and preferably a rain coat, if any movement outside the house is anticipated.

    Each morning one gets to examine the broken branches and blossoms covering the entire area of my private park, not to mention the dark yellow environmentally friendly sludge that covers vehicles, walls, and every flat surface. However we who live here, treat it as a time of excitement, fun, and closeness to nature, albeit a little too close sometimes!

    The real excitement starts about 7 pm, when every python worth his salt, comes out of hiding, and begins to ascend the paperbarks, looking for a fat fox for dinner! This causes great consternation amongst the myriad of curlews, scrub turkeys and owls, who also inhabit my park. The animal noises reach fever pitch until about 9 pm, when the pythons retreat back under my house, into my wall cavities, and into my ceiling, with or without their dinner.

    My poor old dog, takes exception to these reptilian movements, and does his best to contain them, but after having been bitten three times, he has decided to remain upstairs under a table until the blitz has stopped. I must say I haven’t seen much of our usual inhabitants of late, these being big fat echidnas, goannas, and I am sure that other thing is a tree climbing kangaroo, no joke! They are probably waiting for the blitz to pass too!

    You may well ask, how come I have a park with all these animals running wild. Well you see our last mayor decided to have my house rezoned from residential to parkland (without any consultation or notice to me, and without an application notice on my property) before he started the glorious Collins Avenue Project, as I believe he knew all the wild life would have to seek sanctuary somewhere after his bulldozers and chainsaws started the project.

    I can’t say Kev didn’t have wisdom, because all those displaced creatures now live under, on, and in my house, which of course is now officially a Park.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I do believe that this man would have to be one of the luckiest residents of that suburb! And I mean no sarcasm by that at all. I hope that you are enjoying being a part of nature rather than thinking you are above it!

TreeHugger.

Anonymous said...

Geez ... if this Ric guy really exists and isn't just a figment of MM's imagination, then ...

... I guess the next story emanating from MM's word processor will be along the lines of ...

... September 9/11 and everything else that's wrong with this world would not have been, if Kevin Byrne had never been born.

I believe KB's parents met each other at the Cairns Yacht Club on the dance floor.

Now there's a good reason to demolish the grotty tin shed.

C'mon Mike ... lets light up and burn the place down ... whata ya reckon?