My backyard is my own little window on the natural world, and it has been that way since I used to edit the weekly column of a Maitland naturalist, Athel D'Ombrain, for publication in the Herald. That was a long time ago - Mr D'Ombrain stopped writing his columns a few months before his death at age 83 in 1985 - but his accounts of nature at work and play in his own yard, front and back and sides, had a lasting influence on me. Ever since I look in the backyard, and in the Herald today I write of the most notable changes in nature I've seen there. The turkeys one of our regular bloggers, chaff and oats, dropped off at the Herald's front counter get a mention too, because they have grown to look suspiciously like the Australian brush turkey. A friend whose home backs onto the Fernleigh track at Kotara has had until recently a brush turkey as a regular visitor to her yard, and I've read that these native turkeys are moving into suburbia.

Probably the most in-your-face change in my backyard's wildlife has been the nightly flyover of the flying fox, or fruit bat. Thankfully they have yet to put any of my fruit trees on their nocturnal itinerary but the bottle brush out the front is high on their list. I've not seen a ringtail possum for a decade, when in the five previous years I saw a number clattering about the shed guttering or moving along power lines out the front with their tail looped over the line as insurance. That's a sad loss, but I'm not at all sad about the absence of the brushtail possum.

Blue-tongue lizards are fewer, although every couple of years I come across a monster that, I'll admit, gives me a gasping fright. Nope, I don't use poisonous snail bait, and there does seem to be fewer snails about. Have you ever found the predatory, or cannibal, snail in your backyard?

A particularly unwelcome arrival in my yard has been the green ant. They arrived two years ago, seemingly overnight, and I've been stung any number of times since. I've yet to find a way of getting rid of them. I'm puzzled as to why they'd suddenly arrive, why they weren't there earlier.

No frogs, I'm afraid, and this spring I'm going to build a frog pond. Build it, I'm told, and they will come. Maybe I could build a mini creek, with stone races and rushes and water lillies, and a solar-powered recirculator.

The change in my backyard's bird life has been particularly marked, and that's a story I'm going to tell soon. Tell us about the changes in your backyard's natural world.