Over a year ago I said I would post a picture of a mystery caterpillar I used to find on terminalia leaves in the autumn-winter months here (around April-June). Even after checking various websites, I'm still none the wiser as to what it is.
It's a real bummer that I didn't have a better camera. The caterpillars grew to about 8cm in length and could change colour depending on what part of the tree they were resting on. Most of them were either green or brown but I once saw one that was mottled shades of yellow and red.
The very young caterpillars were a bright reddish brown like the shiny new leaves of the terminalia tree, providing good camouflage from predators.
I believe they were the larvae of a large black butterfly with white and dark blue spots on its wings but the websites had so many similar kinds of butterflies only the caterpillars were very different from these ones.
Yesterday, 7 large black cockatoos were perched on my terminalia tree. Unfortunately, when I went to take a picture of them, my camera battery had died
They cause a fair amount of destruction trying to get at the terminalia nuts (tree is also called a beach almond and the nuts are edible for humans but not easy to get at) but we don't see them all that often.
The black and orange cockatoos come from Papua New Guinea and are far larger than the native Australian Sulphur Crested Cockatoo.
That's an interesting-looking caterpillar. I wonder if it is possible to identify it to at least the family level. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much online literature on the insects of Queensland, but I did find a good site for
moths and
butterflies, which may be helpful. I know Brisbane is several hundred kilometers south of you, I think a lot of thr fauna might be similar.
It's cool that you get parrots and cockatoos right in your backyard. The United States' only widespread native parrot (the Carolina Parakeet) got killed off about one hundred years ago by farmers. We still get a few parrot species in areas like extreme southern Texas and Arizona that are likely to be natural vagrants from Mexico (which has many native Psittacines), but these are quite rare. Though perhaps global warming will change that (hahaha).
Over all, our avifauna in the US is very similar to that of Europe - finches, woodpeckers, sparrows, nuthatches, etc.
I'm sure Natalie is quaking in her boots, over this...
I'm hoping that some leafytails will appear this autumn. Thanks to a good wet season, my terminalia tree has grown a lot. We also get large brown loopers on this tree and hairy (itchy grub) caterpillars. Something has been chewing holes in the leaves - haven't seen any caterpillars and suspect grasshoppers which are very common at present.