Leech attack!

I do a regular weekly gardening job up at Kallista and having been doing for a few months now - Iain (the owner) and his wife warned me that there were leeches in the lower garden and kept asking me if I'd been leeched yet - but I have to say I didn't believe them. I thought that they were water side creatures.

Well it turns out that Australia - land of things that bite you in a million different ways has land leeches and these are precisely the little beggars that Iain has in his garden!!!

I saw one making its way towards me a quite some pace for a small worm and squashed it with my fork. The next one I saw was crawling up my sleeve towards my neck! It was swiftly brushed off. Unknown to me a third had attached itself to my leg and was making a meal of me in much the same way that you see in this picture (found on the web). A fourth hitched a lift home with me and ended up on Joshua's bedroom carpet - happily still unfed.

I have to say that I was quite interested to see them in the "flesh" - never having seen one before and even wondered (briefly!!!) about letting one of them latch on to me - having seen Tony Robinson do this on TV recently.

Even having found the hitch-hiker in Josh's bedroom I was still unaware that I HAD allowed one to latch on and that my leg now looked not unlike the picture above (minus the leech). The little devil had snuck up under my trouser leg over my boots and thick socks and found the first bit of bare leg and had a feast!

Having read up on them they apparently apply a small amount of anaesthetic before biting you. Their saliva also contains an anti-coagulant so your blood doesn't clot inside them. Unfortunately this also has the effect that the wound bleeds for quite sometime afterwards. Iain says that he usually notices they've been when he feels his blood trickling down his leg! I can vouch that I didn't feel a thing - even now several hours later I can only feel a slight soreness - but only really because I'm thinking about it.

The idea of them is fairly nasty but evidently they are harmless and don't usually cause a problem.

This is the website I found about them - quite fascinating! I don't think that I'd want to have them bite me every week! I'll be investigating anti-leech precautions for next week!