A little night music

For a couple of months now, on just a few occasions, I've heard the unmistakeable squeal of a plover flying overhead, round about 1 or 2 in the morning. I have previously seen plovers nesting on the grassy park behind the beach, as one commonly does in this state at least, and am well familiar with the noise they make if you dare to walk anywhere within about 30 metres of their eggs, which they lay in clutches right there on the ground. Plovers are guard dogs with wings.

Naturally, I've gone looking for the plovers, but, although March and April is a good time to find them in their Rottweiler mode, there's none nesting close by as far as I can tell. Which makes the plover noises late at night a little mysterious. I don't know much about them ... except to say that I'm sure they're not Wilson's plovers, unless they're migrating way off course from the Americas.

Not so mysterious is the "galumph!" and "thump" of a big ol' possum on my tin roof. This, too, always seems to happen in the early hours of the morning when I'm pretty busy at my desk, or else reading in bed, and consequently I've only seen him or her for a brief moment on two occasions. Possums are common in many, if not most, bushy parts of Australia, even around the cities, and people often have them visiting every evening for a slice of apple or banana. So many readers will wonder that I haven't seen my visitor, considering we are both nocturnal creatures, but that's how it goes. But I feel I know this possum well, because of the regularity of its crash landing above my head, followed by a few leaps and noisy bounds across the corrugated iron while I tap at the keyboard with my two index fingers. The first time I heard it, I thought it was the vengeful spirit of some poor murdered Sandy Beach soul, and I nearly had a heart attack at that time of the night, but that's another story and I won't go into it for sheer embarrassment.

By now the keen reader will have noted that the picture above seems to be neither avian nor marsupial, so I should explain.

Like any relatively red-blooded Aussie male living a hermit's life in a boondocks cell, from time to time (OK, most of the time) I daydream (OK, and nightdream) about nocturnal visitors, but they don't look like the one I had last night, pictured above.

The ten-buck name for this Ghost crab is Ocypode cordimana, and despite the pestilence of vehicular traffic on Australian beaches, a few of them remain to show off their Latin moniker and the beautiful translucence that gives them their common-as-muck Anglo-Saxon one.

Unlike plovers and possums, these crabs aren't noisy, athough other species of Ocypode can play their own arms like a violin, which is a nice trick if you can do it and very economical. This particular little fella, however, only came to my attention at about 10 last night when I heard a scratching coming from the vertical blinds (bane of my life ... I bet you hate them too if you've had them) on the glass sliding door that is the front entrance of the cabin, about one pace from Esmeralda the Computer.

It sounded for all the world like a large Christmas beetle, but seeing Easter's been and gone and we're heading for Hocktide, this made no sense, so I went to investigate. At first, shaded as he was behind the blind, I was certain he was a she, a Garden orb-weaving spider, which made more sense, as, unlike its cousin St Andrew, the orb-waver is not a species known for keeping the ecclesiastical calendar. Besides, there are a few orbies close to my home. Oncloser inspection, of course, the 'spider' was a crab, but I admit to approaching gingerly.

He's cute, ain't he? But not happy, despite having the honour of being the first crab actually to get inside this pad, which is hermetically (one might say, eremitically), against possible egress by John Gould the Gouldian finch, he was not the slightest bit appreciative of being photographed or held. He really looked at me sideways, then ran away in like fashion.

Crabs have been on my mind a lot lately. No wisecracks please. But this day's post in A Sandy Beach Almanac is already long enough, so we'll have to get back to that later. Besides, it's warm and sunny outside -- what the hell am I doing inside??