lots unfortuantly Rabbits, rats, mice, fox's, cane toads, feral cats and dogs, camals, prickly pear just to name a few. Foxs tend to be less common when there is a large dingo population and for some reason the dingo breeds true when they mate with dogs so that could actually help bring the dingo population back up but foxes are even present in the cities. My family live in the outer suburbs of melb and they have foxes comming up from the park near there house. I actually saw one just standing in the street on my way home from work one day (unfortunatly i couldnt get my boning knife out before it ran off)
Dingoes are dogs. Like dogs, they are a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo. They were brought to Australia a few thousand years ago; some anthropologists suggest that they were carried as an emergency food supply. They are more closely related to dogs than to wolves and are considered to be more or less identical to the original ancestral dogs, without having undergone the selective breeding that created the various types in the rest of the world. Look at the thoroughly mongrelized dogs that roam the cities of the Third World, back-bred to their ancestral form, and they're hard to distinguish from dingoes. Dingoes have been crossbreeding with domestic dogs since dogs were introduced to Australia and today it's estimated that one third of the dingoes in the most populated regions of Australia are dog-dingo hybrids. Dingoes are not unique to Australia; small populations are found in Borneo and other islands and even on the Asian mainland. In the USA many foxes have taken up the easy life of scavenging and are not much more of a nuisance than the other species in the camp-follower ecological niche like raccoons and skunks--and considerably less so than the larger ones like coyotes and brown bears. Unfortunately foxes seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to rabies and that does make them a problem. Here in Maryland I read about humans being bitten by rabid foxes several times a year and having to get the treatment. Dogs and cats get bitten more often than humans, but they all have vaccinations. At home in northwestern California rabies will ravage the entire population of foxes in a region and they will all die off at once. The region will then be free of foxes for months or years until they migrate from nearby areas. We see them rooting through our compost pile, they seem to love pasta.
oh FR you have to rember that australia unlike every other contanant on earth was free from preditors (almost compleatly) The only non aquadic preditors were the dingo, aborigionals, the tassi tiger and the tassi devil so our species dont have the defences that animals in other area's have. Thats why foxes are so damaging in australia because they can wipe out whole species when they get into an area
Oh, the plot thickens! Coming home from dogwalk next to the house, we found a little bird out of the nest. We couldn't find the nest, but there were like 8-10 birds flying around us. It was quite big and was able to walk/run. So we left there. Then I thought, hell, why can't I be a bird-daddy? So I cut out a nest of a cardboard and went outside. But the bird was gone! I even let the dog trying to find it, but it was gone in 5 or so minutes. So I assume it was able to fly and flew away/back. It would have been nice to raise it. My plan was doing it outside so its parents could have fed it...
Only if you don't count lizards and snakes and birds and such. Besides, some predators had disappeared, coincident with the arrival of humans on the continent. Earlier, there were predatory kangaroos, and IIRC a couple of other things with sharp teeth etc. Although I generally think it's probably sort of true in a way- that foxes and such are in a way more capable than the existing predators of Australia - another large factor is the landscape changes introduced by the same people that introduced the foxes, and the escape by the foxes from their former well-adapted parasites and diseases and so forth, left behind on their former continents. Oh man. Bil Gilbert (one of my favorite writers on environmental stuff) once wrote that more people should have the experience of raising a baby crow or starling or some other non-endangered "pest" bird, and that such activity should not be forbidden - as it is, pretty much - by governments, on the grounds that the learning opportunity was large and of truly enlightening potential.
sorry i was refering to large preditors. i should have been more specific, a tipan wont take on a walaby for example.
