Bugs and other Creepy Crawlies

So Australia is known for a lot of different species of bugs and dangerous ones too!  Luckily, we haven't encountered any poisonous bugs and just one poisonous snake!  The snake just slithered off, thankfully!  On my first day in Kalgoorlie, I killed 7 spiders in our house and don't get me started on the ants!  We live on a giant ant hill.  Our house is just in their way.  Here are a few pics of some fun bugs and creatures we have captured.

So nobody uses a clothes dryer here.  Everyone just hangs their clothes out to dry on the line.  It's so hot here they dry in no time, at least at this time of year.  So one day I was doing a lot of laundry.  So I was hanging clothes out and taking them down and I looked up and noticed these two friends above me.

I figured they were harmless so I just let them be, but that praying mantis began to creep me out.  I kid you not, his big eyes were following my every move.  I could visibly see him move his head every where I went.  It was seriously creepy!!  It was giving me the heebie jeebies!  Luckily, he was gone the next day.  If he didn't leave of his own free will I was getting ready to move him myself.  He was quite the stalker.

See look how he is staring me down right now?  Those eyes would just follow me everywhere! 


This beastly spider, known as the Huntsman, crawled out of a tree when we were in Esperance.

This spider to me is like not even an insect any more (or whatever spiders are), this thing is like a small animal or rodent! 

We saw this goanna lizard on the side of the road.  It was so cool!

Lastly, there's the cockroaches!  Eww!!  One day we were out swimming and Will loves to open the skimmer box and look inside.  It's something he sees Cory doing, so I think he feel like it's the manly thing to do.  So he kept pointing to something and jabbering on about it and then he'd close it and open it again and do the same thing.  So I finally decided to see what was in there about at the same time that Will was reaching for what ever it was.  Well it was a huge brown cockroach with super long antenna.  It was disgusting and I screamed.  Will was a little shocked that I reacted like that to something that he thought was a little friend.  So I decided it was time to get rid of it.  I tried to just flick it away, and it ran straight into the pool!  I thought maybe it would drown, but no, that bad boy could swim!  So I scooped it up on a kick board and threw it over my fence into the neighbors yard!  Gross!  Gladly, I have no pictures of that!

I'm sure we have many more bugs and creatures to discover!  Can't wait!