As Ipswich residents return home to scenes of flooded households, one couple came home to a more peculiar sight — a cow perched on their neighbour's rooftop.
PHOTOS: Floods hit Queensland
John and Sherry Jewell, from North Booval, couldn't believe their eyes when they spotted the brown bovine standing on the shingle roof looking down on them yesterday.
"We were standing on the edge of the cul de sac and the houses goes down a hill and the cow was just standing there looking at us, looking at it," Mrs Jewell told ninemsn.
"It didn't look scared or freaked out, it looked very relaxed: 'Oh yeah, I'm dealing with my situation no problems'."
Mrs Sherry said the cow was even waving its tail from side to side and munching on the leaves on a nearby tree.
She said the one-storey house was underwater and the roof was probably the only dry area, so she guessed the cow probably just climbed up.
As for the cow's owner, it is still a mystery.
"One of our neighbours had a cow and we thought it was theirs but it wasn't so we got no idea where it came from."
Ipswich local councillor Andrew Antonelli told ninemsn that council rangers did answer a call to come help rescue a cow and that the animal eventually was scared off the roof and onto dry land.
"The cow probably would have been resting on the roof, though the roof would have been more dangerous for it than land. Who knows how long it was there for."
Cr Antonelli added that cows are known to be good swimmers.
"Cows have the natural ability to float in water. It doesn't just sit there and bobble like a duck, it's obviously got a lot of work to do underneath too," he said.
Post-floods stories of animal survival abound.
Cr Antonelli heard about a dairy cow from Rockhampton that floated 40km down a river before being identified by its tag and returned to its owner.
And ninemsn reported earlier on the fox who rode a rubber tyre to safety in Texas, near the NSW-Queensland border. (Read more here)
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