Ian Fraser, talking naturally

I'm a big fan of woodlands; OK, I like any natural habitat, but the openness of woodlands, along with their generally rich wildlife, makes for a great natural history experience. Generally you go to central-west Africa primarily for rainforest, but there are some great woodland reserves too, and Bénoué National Park in central Cameroon is a treasure. It's huge - some 180,000 hectares - and has been reserved for over 80 years; it was officially declared a national park in 1968.

Woodland, Benoue National Park

Cameroon is in the 'armpit' of Africa (don't go reading any double entendre into that!). Colonised by Germany in the 1880s, it was divided between France and Britain after World War I, finally achieving unity and independence in 1961. French and English are the official languages, though English is limited to a relatively small area in the south-west.

Benoue National Park is indicated by the red arrow, bounded to the east by the Benoue River and to the west by the main south-north highway.

Cameroon is not always an easy country for westerners; infrastructure is widely dilapidated, roads are often appalling, and the regular military and police road blocks (whose main purpose is to extract petty bribes from drivers) can be intimidating. Nonetheless, there is not evident grinding poverty and people in general are cheerful and welcoming. Given the levels of corruption reported, I was not optimistic about the state of the parks - indeed we were warned that poaching had seriously damaged Bénoué - but in the event this park at least had good levels of fairly relaxed wildlife. It is surrounded by hunting 'reserves'.

Loder's Kob male, Kobus loderi, Benoue National Park.
This relatively recently recognised species is found across central Africa from Nigeria to western Sudan.

Accommodation in the park is basic but quite adequate, a mix of traditional rondavels (yes, I realise that's a South African term, but it's what they look like!) and less elegant rooms, set above the mostly sandy river.

Benoue accommodation. ('My' room below.)

Dining room - however it's a case of 'bring your own cook'!

An aspect perhaps unexpected to an Australian at least was the presence of people living in the park. I know nothing of their history; it could be that their families were there when the park was declared. One assumes there must be some impact on wildlife, but again I'm unable to comment.

Children of Benoue; I couldn't make out what the game was.

Nonetheless, there were certainly mammals to be seen immediately below the accommodation, in the river bed.

Olive Baboon Papio anubis; not tame, but not intimidated by us. A powerful species, found right across central Africa.

Red-flanked Duiker Cephalophus rufilatus; tiny and shy!

We spent a lot of time by the river, but en route we did see some impressive birds.

Abyssinian Ground Hornbills Bucorvus abyssinicus; very early morning, not much light - sorry.
In the case of their facial adornments, it's blue for girls, red for boys.

Black-bellied Bustard Lissotis melanogaster female.
Unlike some of the species already mentioned, this superb beast is found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa.

This however was our destination and we spent a very pleasant and rewarding morning here - though the residents (below) were highly suspicious of us.

The main goal was the rare and localised Adamawa Turtle-Dove Streptopelia hypopyrrha, a west African special - we didn't see it there, but to be honest I was more than happy with what I did see, though the light was awful, overcast and glarey, as you'll see in the following pictures.

Guereza Colobus Colobus guereza (it goes by a variety of common names);
surely one of the most beautiful of all monkeys, and one I'd long wanted to see.
I spent quite some time with this family of eight or so.

I also saw a bird I never thought to - the strange Egyptian Plover Pluvianus aegyptius, not a plover, long thought to be a pratincole, now given its own family Pluvianidae all to itself.

Egyptian Plover, also called the Crocodile Bird for its supposed habit of providing dental hygiene service to crocs;
sadly this doesn't actually seem to be based on fact.

Two kingfishers - none the less delightful for being common species and widespread through Africa - featured at the waterhole too. Unlike most kingfishers, these two actually do make a living plunging for fish and other water animals.

Giant Kingfisher Megaceryle maxima; this beauty lays claim to being the world's largest kingfisher, though the title is hotly disputed by our own Laughing Kookaburra.

Malachite Kingfisher Alcedo cristata, is one of the smallest, barely a quarter the Giant's size.

The bee-eaters, one of my favourite bird groups, are kingfisher relatives (same Order anyway), and this was the first time I'd seen the glorious Red-throated Bee-eater Merops bullocki.

Red-throated Bee-eater, being especially confiding.

It was hot, the beer at the accommodation was room temperature (ie about 35 degrees), the water pump wasn't working (so no showers or flushing toilets) and the little sweat bees were relentless.

Sweat Bees; the term is used for a wide variety of bees that are attracted to excreted salt, but fortunately in Africa they are mostly stingless little characters in the same family as honeybees, Apidae.

Nonetheless I remember Bénoué fondly. Oh, and in the end we did see the Adamawa Turtledove, albeit somewhat distantly!

I don't suggest you alter your travel plans to take in Bénoué - or even Cameroon, though there's plenty to see there - but if you happen to be in the area...

BACK ON THURSDAY

Today, 1 August, marks the anniversary - according to tradition - of the founding of the Swiss Confederation in 1291 AD. It's a very long time since I paid a brief visit to that spectacular little country, so instead I'll pay tribute to some Swiss people (well, all men actually, as tends to the way with these things) whose names are commemorated in Australian plant names. (There may be some in Australian animal names too, but if so I can't find them.)

Thomasia macrocalyx Family Sterculiaceae; Stirling Ranges National Park, Western Australia.
This genus of some 35 species is almost entirely limited to the south-west; just one species is found in the east.

When Swiss botanist Jacques Etienne Gay named the genus in 1821 he made it clear that he was naming it in honour of no less than five people - surely something of a record! These were twin brothers Abraham and Pierre Thomas, and Abraham's sons Phillippe, Ludwig (or Ludovice) and Emanuel. All collected plants and acted as guides for other collectors in the mountains of south-western Switzerland, around their home village of Les Plans-sur-Bex. Their big break came when eminent polymath Albrecht von Haller engaged Abraham, and they became highly sought-after by other visiting botanists. (Gay worked much of his life in France, and with a bit of detective work, and applying some very rusty Latin, I can report that I believe he based his name on a specimen of Thomasia foliosa, collected in Western Australia in 1801 by Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour, botanist to the mighty Baudin expedition, at Geographe Bay on the south-west peninsula where Busselton now stands.)

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Our second Swiss-named Australian plant is also a genus, but in this case it isn't limited to Australia. There are some 60 Australian species of Calandrinia - broadly called Parakeelya here - with another 80-odd found through North and South America.

Parakeelya, Calandrinia polymorpha, Family Portulacaceae, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.
Parakeelyas are found across inland Australia, giving spectacular displays in good seasons.

Jean-Louis Calandrini, for whom German botanist Carl Kunth named the genus in 1823, was much better known as an eminent physicist and mathematician, based in Geneva to where his parents fled from religious persecution in Italy (one source describes Calandrini as a "staunch Calvinist"). Most sources talk solely of his work on auroras, comets, lightning and trigonometry, and his significant commentary on Isaac Newton's Principia, but I've also read that he wrote on "spontaneous movement of leaves" (?!) and fertilisation of wheat. Clearly a most impressive man, he later gave up his professorships to become Treasurer of the Swiss Republic. What he'd have made of the desert homes of 'his' Australian plants must remain an interesting conjecture.

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The third Swiss name today is applied to a species only, but a pretty familiar one to anyone who spends time on the coast pretty well anywhere in southern Australia. The saltbushes - family Chenopodiaceae - are arid-adapted species found throughout the world, including at least 300 in Australia.Though most are found inland, a few are coastal, and this may indeed have been where they originated.

Sea Berry Saltbush Rhagodia candolleana, Guerilla Bay, New South Wales.

The species was named by French botanist Alfred Moquin-Tandon to honour another Swiss scientist who, unlike Calandrini, was foremost a botanist. Augustin Pyramus de Candolle worked through the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning his career in Paris, continuing it in Montpelier, and spending the last 25 years back in Geneva, where he held the first chair of natural history. He described numerous plant species, but more significantly worked on a major reclassification of plants, trying to produce a 'natural system'. In the process he came to discuss the concept of competition between plant species; Charles Darwin invited him to dinner in London to discuss this idea further, while he was developing his theories of natural selection in 1838. De Candolle also pioneered work on chronobiology, the influence of daily cycles on plant activities; it was a century before our understanding of circadian rhythms reached a point where his work was properly recognised. (Much of this work was done on the 'Sensitive Plant', Mimosa pudica, whose leaves close at night and open in the day; I wonder in passing if the source I alluded to earlier which mentioned Calandrini's work on "spontaneous movement of leaves" was confusing the two men. On the other hand they could well have been collaborating.)

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Our last 'Swiss Australian' has always been something of a mystery to me, but in researching for this posting I found a little more than I had previously managed, in particular the link to the great Scottish botanist Robert Brown who named the genus Burchardia, a small group of five Australian lilies, now generally placed in the family Colchicaceae.

Milkmaids, Burchardia umbellata, Bigga, New South Wales.
This lovely species is widespread in eastern and south-eastern Australia,
but has declined with the loss on native grasslands.

Brown sailed with Matthew Flinders on the important Investigator expedition to Australia from 1801 to 1805, sponsored by Sir Joseph Banks. However Banks also sponsored exploring expeditions to other parts of the world, among them Africa. One whose approach he accepted was that of a young Swiss called Johann Burckhardt, who in 1809 offered to search for the source of the River Niger. He believed that he would be more successful if he could pass himself as a Muslim, a pretty radical idea in early 19th century Europe! Accordingly he studied Arabic at Cambridge, then went to Syria to perfect it, and become an advanced scholar of the Koran, accepted as such by local scholars. (Whether he actually converted remains contentious.) While living there he rediscovered fabulous Petra, Burgon's "rose-red city half as old as time". His ventures into the north African deserts in search of the Niger devastated him, and he died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817, aged just 33. I surmise that Brown met him in London when both were visiting Banks; he named the genus in 1810, just after Burckhardt was there. According to my source - the usually impeccable James Baines' Australian Plant Genera - it was in fact a double-honorific, in that Brown was also acknowledging a much earlier German botanist named Heinrich Burckhardt. Now that I've just looked up Brown's Latin description in his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae however (isn't the internet wonderful?), I find no mention of Johann... For now I'll assume that Baines knew something I don't; I hope so! It's too good a story to ignore.

Meantime, thanks Switzerland, a have a happy celebration!

BACK ON MONDAY

Many years ago I was searching for the elusive Grey Honeyeater Conopophila whitei in mulga woodland near Alice Springs (not the first or last time I've tried - and failed - to find this notoriously elusive and inconspicuous little bird). However the heart definitely beat faster on finding a relatively nondescript bird repeatedly hovering at the foliage; it took a little while to give myself a good mental shake and accept that it was in fact a not-really-very-similar and very much commoner young Western Gerygone Gerygone fusca. What it was doing however was very worthy of our attention and admiration.

Immature Western Gerygone hovering at Mulga Acacia aneura foliage.
The blunt bill alone should have told me immediately that my preliminary id was based on hope rather than science!
(This is an old photo from the pre-digital past.)

Hovering is a remarkable trick, which seems to defy commonsense. In its purest form it involves - to put it simplistically - pushing forward at the same speed as the bird is pushing backwards, while of course also cancelling out gravity, in order to hang in the air. It is often claimed that only the American hummingbirds can truly hover, but I suspect a small amount of Northern Hemisphere bias there; this character was making a pretty fair attempt at it. Elsewhere the two species of Australian spinebill Acanthorhynchus spp. (also honeyeaters) and the African sunbirds are likewise pretty adept, at least to my eyes.

However, there is no doubt that the hummingbirds are the masters; to see them park motionless in front of a flower or a feeder, then suddenly apparently vanish, to rematerialise some metres away, can be quite disconcerting. Not to mention absolutely spell-binding.

Green Thorntail Discosura conversii, Umbrellabird Lodge, Ecuador. (This is a female, hence the lack of thorny tail!)
Despite being taken at 1/100 of a second, the wings are a mere blur. Not surprising, given that they may be beating at up to 80 times a second.

It is that last observation that is the key to it all. The wings are moving in a shallow figure-8, at speeds that make my shoulders ache just thinking about it, basically flying forwards and backwards almost simultaneously. The energy costs are horrendous; their flight muscles comprise 30% of its body weight, far more than for any other bird group, and their heart weighs relatively five times what ours does. At rest a hummer breathes 300 times a minute, again five times what we require. To power such a profligate lifestyle they must fill the tank constantly, drinking up to 150% of their body weight of nectar daily - for me that would mean drinking 120 litres a day!

Bearded Mountaineer Oreonympha nobilis (above) and
Green Violetear Colibri thalassinus (below), Peruvian Andes near Cusco,
both feeding on wild tobacco, Nicotiana sp.
The mountaineer is limited to this area, while the violetear is much more widespread.
These are bigger birds than the thorntail above, and the shots were both taken at 1/500th of a second,
but even so the wings are still blurred.

Other birds - terns and some small birds of prey for instance - also hover, but using a somewhat different principle, using the wind to provide the backward thrust to balance against. It is still a very sophisticated trick, constantly adjusting for the vagaries of the wind by fanning and part-closing wings and tail, while altering power and speed of the wing strokes.

Nankeen Kestrel Falco cenchroides, near Canberra.
This bird was operating in a relatively light breeze, as the fully fanned tail and erect posture suggest,
both maximising the body's resistance to it.

Hovering in these situations provides a sort of platform for the bird to scan the ground for prey. Remarkably, but necessarily, the head remains almost motionless while the body is making its continual adjustments - indeed it has been calculated that a kestrel's head 'wobbles' by no more than 5mm while hovering.

In a stronger breeze the bird can afford to hover in more of a horizontal position, using 'scooping' wing beats to oppose the wind.

Black-shouldered Kite Elanus notatus (above, near Forbes, New South Wales)
and Nankeen Kestrel (below, Sturt National Park, New South Wales),

I am awed by the precision and power required for such a misleadingly effortless-seeming behaviour; wouldn't you love to hover go?

BACK ON THURSDAY

This is another in a periodic series on colours in nature, though it's now a while since I promised to wrap up the mini-series on yellow with a posting on yellow flowers. It seems that not a lot of work has been done on flower pigments (compared with pigments in fruits and vegetables for instance) but it seems agreed that flavonoids are the most important class of yellow-causing pigments in flowers. Yellow is a good colour for insects - they see better at the blue-yellow end of the visible spectrum than at the red end. Today however I just want to have a bit of fun, and parade some of my favourite yellow flowers, beginning with A and ending with Z!

My intention was to keep it simple, and to show a yellow-flowering species from one genus for every letter of the alphabet. It almost worked too. Y was never a starter, as there is no Y in Latin; other than that the two letters I couldn't come up with anything for were Q, perhaps unsurprisingly, and K, a little more surprising. Lastly, and surprisingly, I failed on F too, though here at least I could offer you a species name instead! Enough blathering, let's start the journey.

Alstroemeria patagonica, in the cold and windy Torres del Paine NP, Chilean Patagonia.
The family, Alstroemeriaceae, is limited to South America.


Bossiaea foliosa, Buccleuch State Forest, west of Canberra. This lovely pea shrub lights up the entire Snow Gum understorey in early summer in a good season.

Calceolaria biflora, again from Torres del Paine NP.
Current thinking takes it out of Scrophulariaceae and puts it into its own family, Calceolariaceae.
One of several unrelated plants called 'Lady's Slippers' for obvious reasons.

Dillwynia sericea, Silky Parrot Pea, Canberra
A common and distinctive shrub in the dry forests that are my 'back yard'.

Eremophila maculata, south-west Queensland. Family Myoporaceae (or Scrophulariaceae).
A yellow form of a generally red flowering shrub, widespread in inland Australia.

Arbutilon fraseri, western south Northern Territory. This is the one where I had to fall back onto the species name, though you might think I'm biased. This Fraser though was Charles, first colonial botanist of New South Wales.
Family Malvaceae; most of this big genus is South American, though there are some 30 inland Australian species.

Gavilea lutea, Torres del P aine NP, Chile.
A spectacular big orchid from grassy areas of the far south of South America.

Hypoxis sp., Ngaoundaba Ranch, central Cameroon. This is a huge genus of some 150 species found in damp grassy places right across the southern hemisphere, including 10 in Australia. Family Hypoxidaceae.

Isopogon anethifolius, Bundanoon, New South Wales. Family Proteaceae.
An important component, as a genus, of sandy and sandstone heathlands in south-west and south-east Australia.

Jonesiopsi roei, north-east of Perth. And I agree, it's not very yellow, but I was struggling a bit for J.
This one's for the eminent (and some might suggest maverick) Australian orchidologist David Jones.

Labichea lanceolata, Kalbarri NP, Western Australia. Family Caesalpinaceae.
An endemic genus of 14 species found across inland northern Australia.

Microseris lanceolata, Canberra. A widespread, but now uncommon, species of daisy, whose story I told here last yeat.

Nuytsia floribunda, Western Australian Christmas Tree, Cape le Grande National Park, family Loranthaceae.
A mistletoe that grows as a tree, drawing water and nutrients from the roots of nearby plants.

Odontoglossum mystacimum, Manu National Park cloud forest, Peru.
A huge orchid genus, with some truly spectacular species;
this is one of my favourites, growing at 4000 metres above sea level.

Podolepis jaceoides, Namadgi National Park near Canberra.
I love the 'frayed ends' of the ray florets of these big high country daisies.


Ranunculus sp., Tallong, New South Wales. The surface cell structure of these buttercups acts as a mirror to attract pollinating insects.

Senna coriacea, Caralue Bluff Conservation Park, South Australia. Family Caesalpinaceae.
The sennas are found throughout inland Australia, brightening entire landscapes sometimes.

Tricoryne elatior, Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near Canberra. Family Anthericaceae (or Phormiaceae).
A summer-flowering lily of grasslands, one of seven Australian members of the genus
(one of which extends to New Guinea).

Utrichularia odorata, Fogg Dam near Darwin, Northern Territory. Family Lentibulariaceae.
The bladderworts grow in water, trapping tiny animals in senstive 'bags' on the roots.

Viola maculata, Chilean Patagonia.
Was it so unreasonable to expect that violets should be violet - even in South America? Apparently yes.


Waitzia nitida, Kalbarri NP, Western Australia. An attractive widespread group of about five dryland Australian paper daisies.

Xyris operculata, Morton National Park, New South Wales.
An enormous genus of wetland plants found mostly in northern South America.
(I bet you didn't think I coud do an X...)

Oh no!!! I was sure I had photos of Zygophyllum - must have been from my pre-digital days, how disappointing. I'll have to fix that retrospectively one day - sorry!

Meantime though, I hope you've had fun, thanks for coming along.

BACK ON MONDAY

The Reverend Samuel Goodenough, Bishop of Carlisle, died in on this day in 1827. English botanist John Smith, co-founder with Goodenough of the Linnean Society of London in 1788, named the large Australian genus Goodenia for him in 1793. As well as containing some 180 species, nearly all Australian, it is the type genus of a family which includes such well-known Australian genera as Lechenaultia, Dampiera and Scaevola.

Goodenia beardiana, Twin Creeks Reserve, Western Australia.

Goodenia ovata, Bundanoon, New South Wales.

It seems rather ironic that the Bishop should have honoured Linnaeus with the name of the still-eminent taxonomic society; he was profoundly appalled by Linnaeus' decision to use the sex organs of flowers as a basic part of his classification system. It wasn't because this system was so arbitrary - Linnaeus knew that, and saw it as merely an essential first 'pigeon-holing' step - but because it wasn't seemly to even acknowledge that flowers had such inelegant dangly bits!

"To tell you that nothing could equal the gross prurience of Linnaeus' mind is perfectly needless. A literal translation of the first principles of Linnaean botany is enough to shock female modesty. It is possible that many virtuous students might not be able to make out the similitude of Clitoria." wrote Goodenough to a fellow Linnean Society member in 1808. It seems that one thing that dismayed him was that ladies would no longer be able to dabble in botany as a genteel hobby.

Presumably ornithologists Nicholas Vigor (Irish) and Dr Thomas Horsfield (from the US) were able to overlook this eccentricity when they named the lovely Red-capped Robin for him "in honour of this most reverend and most erudite man".

Red-capped Robin Petroica goodenovii, Forbes, New South Wales.

Overall I reckon the bishop came out of it rather well, considering.

Today would also have been my dad's birthday; thinking of you Fred.

BACK ON FRIDAY

It was one of the thrills of my natural history life to get off the aircraft at Baltra Airport, an ex-military base in the midst of a typically Galápagos lava field, and suddenly realise that the 'sparrows' around my feet were in fact the famous 'Darwin's Finches'. It was one of those literally breath-taking moments.

Medium Ground Geospiza fortis and Large Ground Finch G. magnirostris, Baltra Airport; females or immatures.
Distinguishing them is not always easy, but that's not because they're hard to see!

I put the name in quotes advisedly; not only were they not referred to as 'Darwin's' until the 20th century, but we're very confident now that they're not finches. Their actual nature is still somewhat problematic, but the general consensus is that they're probably highly evolved tanagers, whose ancestors - probably like a grassquit, small and plain - blew across the Pacific about a million years ago.

In that time, under immense evolutionary pressures due to living in such an often brutally harsh environment, racked by regular La Niña droughts and El Niño flooding, some 13 species have developed, filling niches occupied elsewhere by groups including warblers, small woodpeckers - and of course finches. For a superbly vivid and rivetting account of their (ongoing) evolution, you can't go past Jonathon Weiner's wonderful The Beak of the Finch; evolution in real time. In large part this is the story of the remarkable Rosemary and Peter Grant, British biologists based at Princeton who have spent 6 months of each of the last 40 years (at least until recently) on little exposed Daphne Major, following, knowing and measuring every finch on the island. The rapidity of changes that they observed in species under such pressures is astounding. It's one of the great stories of modern biology.

Daphne Major at dawn. The expeditioners' landing place is among the low cliffs to the right; no beaches or jetties here!

Among the ground and cactus finches, adult males are black.

Large Ground Finch male, Puerto Ayora. The bills are adapted for seed collection, different sized bills being suited to seeds of differing size and hardness.

Cactus Finch G. scandens, Puerto Ayora on Opuntia cactus. The bird relies heavily on the Opuntia, for nectar, pollen, fruit and seeds at different times of the year.

Living in such a precarious environment requires flexibility and the finches on different islands have adapted to a range of opportunities.

Small Ground Finch G. fuliginosa, Isla Fernandina, gleaning parasites and dead skin from Marine Iguanas.

In some birds the differences in beaks between species - which is the key difference for the most part - is relatively minor. It is reputed that the staff of the hugely significant Charles Darwin Research Centre say that "only God and Peter Grant" can claim to reliably assign a species to every bird encountered.

The birds are famous because of their role in the growing understanding of the great Charles Darwin as to how species evolve, but the connection wasn't as immediate and clear-cut as is sometimes asserted - mythology has replaced history in some accounts. By that stage of the voyage, they had been away from home for nearly 4 years and were understandably anxious to get home. Perhaps partly because of this Darwin wasn't quite as meticulous as he generally was. At the time of his 1835 five week stay in the Galápagos he was still fairly conservative by the standards of his circle of peers and hadn't yet accepted the concept of species changing. It was another creationist, a young John Gould, who back home identified his finches as a group of closely related species; Darwin hadn't considered that separate but closely related species could exist on islands in sight of each other, and he had to scramble to identify exactly where his specimens had come from. (At the time he was more interested by the mockingbird species.)

It was another 10 years before he wrote, in the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle: "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one, small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends." This was truly revolutionary stuff.

For the rest, let me share with you some of the beak variations among other species.

Woodpecker Finch Camarhynchus pallidus, Los Gemelos, Santa Cruz.
In this species the sexes are indistinguishable. The strong woodpecker-like bill is used to probe crevices and rip bark in search of invertebrate prey. When times are tough in the dry season however, it famously fashions and uses cactus spines and fine sticks to extract nutritious items from hollows.

The massive parrot-like bill of the Vegetarian Finch C. crassirostris is employed to snip off buds, leaves, fruit and seeds, and to strip bark off growing shoots to access sugar-rich sap. Here is a female on Santa Cruz.

Small Tree Finch C. parvulus, Los Gemelos, Santa Cruz; female or immature.
Its stubby curved bill is specialised for tweezering insects and grubs from leaf and bark surfaces
and extracting larvae from inside soft stems.

Green Warbler Finch Certhidia olivacea, Los Gemelos, Santa Cruz. Sexes are identical.
Another insect-hunter, its slender warbler-like bill extracts prey from moss beds and litter, and uniquely among the Galapagos finches, catches insects on the wing.

And there are another five that I've not yet seen; all fascinating birds. If you can possibly get to see them one day, I'd urge you to do so. You'll never be sorry.

Large Ground Finch, Puerto Ayora.

BACK ON WEDNESDAY

Augustus Charles Gregory was born in England on this day in 1819, son of an army Lieutenant. Wounded, his father accepted a land grant in the new Swan River colony (now Western Australia, and struggling badly at the time) in place of an army pension, when Augustus was 10. He went on to become a most successful explorer, though not nearly well enough known, for reasons that I believe to be highly ironic - we'll get to that - and an unusually respected politician. His first remarkable stroke of luck was having as a neighbour the impressive Surveyor-General John Roe, who encouraged Augustus to join the department as a cadet in 1841. His bush skills and general competence led him to be appointed just six years later, still not 30 years old, to lead his first exploring expedition north of Perth, returning with reports of good grazing land and a coal seam. This led to more such engagements, including the mapping of part of the Murchison River and the opening of the country where Geraldton now stands; this was all tough country.

Murchison River, Kalbarri National Park; probably here at least still much as Gregory saw it.

While the biographies tend not to mention it, it is clear that Gregory was already collecting plant specimens and sending them to Ferdinand von Mueller, probably the greatest of the 19th century Australian botanists.

Desert Kurrajong Brachychiton gregorii, central Australia (through a rain-spotted lens!).
The type specimen was collected by Gregory in the Murchison area and sent to von Mueller, who named it.

In 1855 he led one of the great Australian exploring expeditions, the North Australian Expedition which crossed a great unknown swathe of the country from the north-west to Brisbane on the east coast, well over 5000km, mostly on foot. Crucially from a biological perspective, the company included von Mueller,temporarily unemployed while the Victorian government couldn't pay him in his position as government botanist. 16 months after setting out, the expeditioners walked into Brisbane just in time for Christmas.

Baobab, Adansonia gregorii, Gregory National Park (also named for Augustus), East Kimberley, western Northern Territory; collected by von Mueller on the North Australian Expedition and named by him for Augustus Gregory.

Gregory continued collecting for von Mueller on subsequent expeditions, notably the unsuccessful search for the tragic Leichhardt expedition in central Australia. (His lack of success wasn't surprising; Leichhardt had disappeared in 1848 - 10 years previously - somewhere between Brisbane and Perth!)

This was his last expedition and he is seldom mentioned now in the same breath as some of the other great (and a few 'great') explorers. I think he was a victim of his own modesty, humanity and excellent planning. He insisted on exemplary behaviour towards aboriginal people through his lands he passed, and planned meticulously. All of this combined to mean that his teams were content, safe, healthy and always knew where they were - none of which made for exciting news stories! Additionally he didn't talk much about his achievements, and was apparently cheerful and well-liked, which were also probably not newsworthy characteristics.

He became Queensland Surveyor-general, then Geological Surveyor, for 20 years, then entered the Queensland Legislative Assembly where he spent the remaining 23 years of his life attacking government and aligning himself with the conservative squatters' bloc. He was reputedly incorruptible and refused government ministries so as not to compromise himself.

Senecio gregorii, Lasseter Highway, Northern Territory - South Australian border.
Collected by Gregory on the Leichhardt search expedition, and named for him by von Mueller.

Would I have got on with him I wonder? In the bush certainly, but probably not in town. No matter, he was one of our greatest explorers, though unsung, and contributed his share to our knowledge of the north and dry centre. Worth acknowledging I think.

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Also on this day, in 1803, surprisingly - because it was more than 15 years since the founding of the British colony at Sydney - the first Koalas known to Europeans were collected from what is now the Wollongong area.

BACK ON MONDAY

I have to specify that in the title, because elsewhere in the world people are likely to think of the superb Murchison Falls in Uganda - and they too will get a turn here in due course. I am prompted by my mention in the last posting of Augustus Gregory's mapping of part the Murchison River in 1848. Both features were named for Sir Roderick Murchison, Scottish geologist and president of the British Royal Geographical Society.

The Murchison River is the second longest in Western Australia, flowing for some 800km from the dry inland Robinson Range to the sea at Kalbarri National Park near Geraldton on the semi-arid Indian Ocean coast, much of the water coming from overflow of salt lakes which fill only during cyclonic summer rains.

The red arrow point indicates Kalbarri and the mouth of the Murchison, flowing from the north-east.

The Murchison Gorge in Kalbarri NP is just magnificent, 80 kilometres of huge red sandstone cliffs above the sharply twisting river bed, with wildflower-rich sandy dry eucalypt woodlands on the plains above.

The Murchison, in the dry season, beneath the cliffs at Ross Graham Lookout, Kalbarri NP.

Dry woodlands, typical of the sandplains of Kalbarri above the Murchison.

"Nature's Window", a wind-eroded feature high above the Murchison.


Down at river level, a quiet pool. While the level is low here, after a dry summer when the cyclones don't bring rain this far south, the flow can stop altogether.

Mind you, it can still rain there even in the dry season!

Semi-arid Kalbarri NP woodland rapidly becoming awash!

The rocks contain some fascinating stories too.

The tubes are in fact Skolithos - casts of the burrows of worms that lived in a shallow sea here some 410 years ago.

Another fossil here, almost overlooking the Murchison, is one of the most exciting fossil traces I've ever seen. It marks one of the first forays ashore of a major predator, over 400 million years ago in the Silurian.


These tracks are those of a eurypterid, or 'sea scorpion', the top predator of its time, which here followed small prey ashore onto a soft muddy shore, where they had doubtless thought they were safe!

Today the predators are generally out of sight, but the wildflowers of the Murchison plains are some of the most spectacular in Australia; let me share a few of my favourites with you.

Tall Mulla Mulla Ptilotus macrocephalus, in almost unimaginably massed flowering; this species is widespread across the arid inland, but I've never seen it like this.

Pink Milkmaids Burchardia rosea, family Colchicaceae.
One of just five species in the genus, this beautiful lily is restricted to the Murchison area.
For more about the somewhat mysterious person it was named for, see here.

Two superb big grevilleas light up the plains too, and are not found much further afield from here.

Grevillea candelabroides, above, and
Grevillea petrophiloides (Pink Pokers) below

Wiry Honeymyrtle Melaleuca nematophylla, another magnificent massed display.

And finally, a sandplains representative of one of the most beautiful West Australian genera, the Myrtaceous Verticordias - the genus name means 'heart turner'.

Verticordia monodelpha, guaranteed to turn both hearts and heads!

Which indeed is true of the mighty Murchison itself, and the rest of Kalbarri where it ends its journey. Make a date to get there some time, preferably in late winter or early spring.

I am about to head west myself, though not this far north this time, taking a group of people to explore the rich south-west corner. There'll be lots to talk about when I get back, so please don't forget me!

BACK ON TUESDAY 1 OCTOBER

This is not my usual natural history posting - in fact I'm still in Western Australia, about to start the 4000km drive home tomorrow. I don't have time or facilities for a 'real' posting, but events here since I last wrote have driven me to say something to the many people in many lands who continue to surprise me by reading my offerings.

The newly elected government of Australia has already filled me - and many others I know - with shame and embarrassment. This is not the place for a polemic, but I do want to offer my apologies, as an Australian, to those who are doubtless puzzled and even offended by unfolding events here. Both major parties sought, during the election campaign, to outdo each other in abnegating Australia's moral and legal responsibilities to the displaced of the world, and this is to our deep shame. In years to come I have no doubt that a more enlightened parliament will offer an apology to those victims, as recent ones have to 'stolen' Aboriginal children.

More immediately relevant though to those who read this blog is the perplexing and alarming formal rejection of science; there is to be no Minister for Science in the new cabinet (composed almost exclusively of middle-aged white men), a concept which I find utterly bizarre. More directly they have already abolished the independent Climate Commission, the only independent source of information and advice on this most critical of issues - bloody-minded madness. There is to be no Minister for Higher Education, apparently another deliberate move towards dumbing down the country.

The future of biodiversity management can only be viewed with despondency.

This is not why you read this blog, I know, and I won't be carrying on with this theme in future. Please know however, that there are many of us here who do not feel represented by this lot, and who reject such 1950s 'thinking'.

Meantime, back with a normal posting on Tuesday 1 October, as promised!

It's nice to be back writing a post after a solid - but exhilarating - month's work in the south-west of far-off Western Australia, including an 8000 km return drive there and back. Part of that drive involves 'the crossing', still one of Australia's great driving experiences, though it's a lot easier now than when my parents did it on a dirt track back in 1947. 'The Nullarbor' is part of modern Australian folklore, though most of us would have trouble defining it. I think it's best to think of it as the vast limestone plain - the largest in the world - that stretches for some 2000km from west of Ceduna in South Australia nearly to Norseman in Western Australia (henceforth WA), covering a quarter of a million square kilometres. Others would define it more tightly as the treeless 'core' straddling the state borders. Some people even use the term very loosely to talk about the whole drive from Adelaide to Perth, but that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

The red arrow in the Great Australian Bight indicates the general area of the Nullarbor. I have shown the huge karst (limestone) plain in purple hatching, with the 'core' in blue horizontal stripes. If you enlarge the map you'll see that the Eyre Highway runs mostly through the southern fringe, some of it very close to the coast.

The somewhat twee name Nullarbor was coined in 1866 by South Australian Surveyor Edmund Delisser, who crossed to the WA border and reported a vast treeless tract; being of the Victorian era he felt obliged to invent a Latin term which essentially means 'no trees'.

Coming from the east, we leave agricultural land in the vicinity of Nundroo, where beautiful mallees (multi-stemmed eucalypts of many species) form an overstorey over the bluebushes (saltbushes of the family Chenopodicaceae) which continue west when the trees end.

Eucalyptus calcareana (the name refers to the limestone habitat) over bluebush, Maireana spp., near Nundroo.

The vast plateau we're driving across was laid down under a shallow sea - beneath the bitumen are the calcium-based shells and exoskeletons of billions of long-dead marine animals. Towards the state border the trees get fewer and the bluebush starts to take over.

Eastern edge of the plain, with only scattered trees now to break the horizon.

Soon, even those trees disappear, and a variety of low shrubs begins to completely dominate.

Low teatrees - including Melaleuca spp. - above,
and chenopods (especially bluebushes and saltbushes) below,
forming the great treeless plains.

Here the road is close to the shore of the Southern Ocean, forming the Great Australian Bight, and the line of the Bunda Cliffs, running for well over a hundred kilometres and up to 100 metres high, is one of the most superb seascapes in the country.

The magnificent Bunda cliffs, near the Head of the Bight (above and below).

Virtually at the border, the cliffs begin to march inland.

The Bunda Cliffs leave the coast here, at the state border, so that there is now a coastal plain seaward of the plateau.

At Eucla, just inside WA, the highway descends onto the Roe Plain, a broad coastal strip of ancient compacted dunes. For nearly 200km we drive along this plain, at the foot of the Hampton Plateau, until at the Madura pass we climb up onto the plateau again.

Two views from the top of the Madura Pass; above, looking east along the edge of the Hampton Plateau.
Below, looking out towards the distant ocean across the Roe Plain.

As can be seen from the photos above, the trees have by now returned to the landscape; again mallees dominate.

Eucalyptus socialis woodland near Caiguna, WA.

Also near Caiguna is what is claimed to be the longest completely straight stretch of road - 146km without the slightest deviation - in Australia. (Some say the world, but I'm not claiming that! It does seem unchallenged however that the Transcontinental Railway to the north of the road is indeed the longest dead straight length of line - 480km of it.)

Start of the 146km straight, just west of Caiguna.

As you'd expect with such an extensive karst system, limestone caves riddle the landscape, though most are not accessible to the public.

Sinkhole just outside of Caiguna. Some of the caves have produced some very important fossil troves, including the only complete skeleton of the formidable marsupial 'lion', Thylacoleo carnifex.

Finally, near Balladonia, we enter the beautiful vast woodlands of the Goldfields area of WA, worthy of a posting in their own right one day.

If you get the chance to make the crossing, please do it one day (or rather, at least three days for the section discussed here!). I've done the return trip five times now, and I'm sure I'll be doing it again. If you're Australian, it's definitely an important part of the national experience. If you're visiting, it will also leave a deep impression on you. I think you'll agree with me that the experience has no need of such silly cheap gimmicks as an extended golf course - it's much too special in its own right.

BACK ON FRIDAY, TO TALK ABOUT SOME ANIMALS OF THE NULLARBOR, INDCLUDING ONE VERY SPECIAL ONE INDEED.

In the last posting I waffled enthusiastically about the wonderful Nullarbor Plain, and summarised the drive across in terms of the physical environments and vegetation encountered. Needless to say there is plenty of wildlife to see too, though much of it is small and tends to keep its collective head down out of the wind and out of view.This is not true of all animals though.

Dingo, Canis lupus dingo, east of Nundroo.
These Australian wolves can be seen anwhere, at any time of the day. See here for more information.

Crimson Chat Epthianura tricolor, Head of the Bight.
Note that Australian chats have no relationships with anything called a chat in other lands;
we now know in fact that they are true honeyeaters.

Birds however are probably more evident in the treed sections either side of the treeless plain.

Major Mitchell Cockatoo Lophochroa leadbeateri, near Nundroo.
This truly glorious cockatoo is thinly scattered across the arid inland.

Yellow-plumed Honeyeater Lichenostomus ornatus, Nundroo, gleaning scale insects from mallee eucalypt leaves.

Nankeen Kestrel Falco cenchroides pair, Eucla.
The dragon lizard in the claws of the larger female on the right is a reminder that, as throughout dry Australia,
lizards are a dominant life form here.

Indeed, the animal you're most likely to see with some regularity in warm weather is the aberrant skink that I grew up calling affectionately Sleepy Lizard, but which is more generally known as Shingleback Tiliqua rugosa. They are regularly encountered crossing the road and some certainly don't get to the other side, but it does seem to me that drivers may be showing more lizard-awareness than in times past. The number of casualties seems low relative to the number of live ones seen, given that they are pretty ambling by nature, and have the unfortunate habit of stopping to threaten the car that's just passed, instead of getting off the road.

Tiliqua rugosa

Tiliqua rugosaTil

One of the many endearing things about Shinglebacks is that they seem to pair for life, an unusual behaviour among reptiles - indeed among animals in general.
Much more to be said about these animals, one of my very favourites, in a post to come!

However, there is one animal, a mammal, which is probably the one that most people making the crossing between May and October make a special effort to see. These days though, thanks to the Yalata Aboriginal Community which runs the excellent interpretive centre, and the South Australian Parks Service, the effort to see this spectacular animal is minimal. In fact, I suspect this is one of the world's truly great land-based whale-watching experiences.

From this platform on top of the spectacular Bunda Cliffs can be seen at close quarters....

Tail of Southern Right Whale Eubalaena australis, immediately below the cliffs.

In May these mighty animals begin to appear in the Bight - and other southern Australian waters - having migrated north from the far Southern Ocean where they spend summer. Initially only adults are present, but by August females are starting to give birth in the sheltered on-shore waters.

Southern Right Whale with calf.
This youngster was becoming adventurous, swimming away from mum, but not for long.

At birth the calf already weighs a tonne, but on a diet of very rich milk gains 50kg a day.
A female only has one baby every three years.

They are baleen whales - that is, they sieve plankton and small animals through baleen plates,a filter of long bristles along the upper jaw.

The baleen can be seen clearly in this adult - as can the callosities, raised roughened patches of skin - which are used to identify individual animals.

The adults weigh up to 50 tonnes and are up 17 metres long. Like all the great whales they suffered terribly from over-hunting, well into the 20th century; being slow and having a body which floats after death, they were regarded as the 'right' whale to hunt by inshore whalers. Once they were in vast numbers - the Tasmanian governor once complained that their 'snoring' in the Derwent River kept him awake at night, and it was dangerous to navigate the river in winter. Numbers crashed from an estimated 65,000 - 100,000 originally to perhaps 300 in the 1920s. At least 150,000 were killed during the 19th century. A single animal reported off Western Australia in 1955 was apparently the first in Australian waters for the century. Despite theoretical world-wide protection recovery was very slow - explained in part by a later confession by Russia that they had continued illegally killing the species in the Antarctic during the Soviet 1960s.

There may be now 15,000 Southern Right Whales in the world, a steadily increasing number; some 2,000 of those visit southern Australian waters.

A group of four Southern Right Whales from the viewing platform - truly a thrilling sight. There were at least 10 present during our visit in late September.

There are many reasons to cross the Nullarbor, as I tried to explain last time; this one alone however surely is enough.

BACK ON TUESDAY

William Swainson, a passionate and skilled English naturalist and artist, was born on this day in 1789. Unfortunately his passion seemed to blind him to his own limits at crucial points of his career, a myopia which can either lead to greatness, or – as in his case – a tumble into something malodorous.

At the age of 14 he followed his father into the customs service, but already the lure of natural history was loud in his ears and in order to travel he joined the army (not as a combatant, but on the staff of the Commissary-General) and spent years immersed in the plants and animals of the eastern Mediterranean. Unspecified illness forced him from the army at age 26 on half-pay to pursue his real love, which by now was further empowered by discovering and developing his considerable skills as an artist. Crucially this happened at just the time that the new process of lithography was being introduced, enabling an artist to draw directly onto a stone printing block (with a waxy pencil, to which oily inks adhered) rather than having to rely on an engraver to accurately interpret the artist’s work on a copper plate. Teams of colourists hand-coloured the books, following the artist’s colour template. This was a revolution akin to modern publishing software, allowing artists to self-publish.

Swainson did just that, pioneering the technique among naturalists, following a trip to Brazil which he undertook almost as soon as he left the army. He was not the first or last naturalist to succumb to the call of the tropics. Nor was he the first or last to have trip to the tropics disrupted by political upheaval, but he collected enough to begin a series of subscription-paid books of Brazilian birds, and of shells, on which he had become an authority. They were published in sections, each section subsidising the next.

Several bird names were published by him, including some Australian ones. He was sufficiently respected for the French ornithologist Anselme Desmarest to name a particularly spectacular Australian parrot in his honour.

male Superb Parrot Polytelis swainsonii, Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve, Canberra.

Additionally, bird species from Africa and the Americas were also named for him, though not all the original names have survived.

Swainson's Thrush Catharus ustulatus, Mindo Valley, Ecuador.
This species was named by the US-based English ornithologist Thomas Nuttall.

Meantime, most unfortunately, he had enthusiastically espoused the new classification system developed by WS MacLeay, the Quinary system. (MacLeay had already been a diplomat and judge in the Spanish-English slave abolition commission in Cuba and went on to play a major role in Australian entomology.) It was a serious attempt at classification, but from our perspective it was also seriously loopy. Groups of animals were allocated to one of three circles, containing respectively ‘typical’, ‘subtypical’ and ‘aberrant’ members of the group. The ‘aberrant’ circle was further divided into three circles (hence the five of the quinary). Associations of speciesin different circles were linked with lines. The leading biologists of the day took an interest – then shied away from its utter arbitrariness and irrelevance to the real world. Not Swainson though. He was excited by the evident links between tigers and zebras, on the basis that both are ‘striped and impossible to tame’. Or baboons and whales with ‘head very large, little or no tail’, or macaques and rodents with ‘tail relatively long, hare-lipped’. This did not enhance his standing, but it didn’t totally destroy it either.

Cheaper book printing processes also developed at this time, and Swainson contributed to the revolution in learning which accompanied the availability of affordable books by writing for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopediaseries. He produced 11 volumes on a wide range of topics before the difficulties of working with Lardner got too much for him and he emigrated to New Zealand. The question of the relative contribution to this move of his problems with Lardner and the fall-out from the Quinary episode is unclear; both are cited as reasons.

He should probably have stayed in New Zealand, though Maori land claims over ‘his’ estate meant it wasn’t an entirely happy time. However, for reasons and in ways not at all clear, he was head-hunted in 1853 by the Victorian government to work on the colonial tree flora; as far as I can determine he had never published or even shown any particular in botany before. Beware the late arrival in a field. With explicit disdain for those who had gone before, he listed in his report 1520 Victorian ‘gum trees’ and 213 casuarinas (where we now recognise about 14). He would have done more but ran out of names…

He died two years later back in New Zealand. He predicted ‘surprise and almost incredulity amongst the botanists of Europe’. Indeed. Sir William Hooker of Kew – a man noted for his tolerance and tact – wrote to von Mueller “in my life I think I never read such a series of trash and nonsense. There is a man who left this country with the character of a first rate naturalist, and of a very first rate natural history artist, and he goes to Australia and takes up the subject of botany, of which he is as ignorant as a goose.”

Given this, the existence of the Australian pea genus Swainsonamight seem surprising, but in fact it honours William’s much older cousin Isaac, botanical garden owner, herbalist – and purveyor of apparently quack medicines.

Swainsona galegifolia, Liverpool Range, New South Wales.

Perhaps William should have left the plant side of biology to him; it’s probably better to be remembered as a parrot than a goose.

BACK TOMORROW WITH A LIGHT OFFERING

The view from over the fence of a very fancy and pricey-looking winery-cum-conference centre in the Margaret River area of far south-western Western Australia.

Whether this Little Black Cormorant Phalacrocorax sulcirostris was perfecting the pose or just taking the mickey,
I reckon she just about nailed it.
The statue's right arm might offer a hint as to her motives though.

BACK FRIDAY FOR A 'PROPER' POST!

Ecuador is a wonderful destination for anyone who cares about nature, and it seems that the government actually realises this. One of the wonderful things about the country to me is that it has an official National Avitourism Strategy! I wish my country did... An important part of the strategy is the involvement of local communities in helping people see the astonishingly rich birdlife of Ecuador - in just 280,000 square kilometres (about the size of Victoria, for my Australian readers) there are some 1600 bird species, which is an amazing 15% of the world's total, and more than half of all South America's! One of the cornerstones of birding tourism in Ecuador is the rich Mindo Valley area, a little north-west of Quito, part of the Chocó cloudforest bioregion, one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Many people have worked to protect and promote it, significant among them being members of the Mindo Cloudforest Foundation, but one resident, a quiet smiling man, has earned a place in birding folklore.

Ten years ago Angel Paz and his family were poor farmers, contributing in their small way to the incremental loss of the cloud forests. Today they are regarded as pioneers and leaders in cloud forest conservation tourism. Until recently their place - open only through bookings - was better known as Paz de las Antpittas, but the more general name seems now to be preferred. Paz in Spanish means peace; 'Peace of the Birds' is a lovely name, apart from the allusion to the family behind it.

Angel Paz (and a blogging birder you may have heard of).
Photo courtesy of Juan Cardenas - gracias amigo!

In 2004 Angel discovered a small Andean Cock-of-the-Rock lek in a forest gully and, encouraged by local bird lodges to diversify his income, he built a track down to it to attract birding visitors.

Cloud forest, Paz de las Aves.

During the building process he noticed a plain bird following him in the hope of obtaining worms; all he knew of it was that it was edible. Fortunately on this occasion he resisted any temptation in that direction, and local ecotourism operators convinced him that if the cocks were silver attractions to birders, then Giant Antpittas were pure gold.

Giant Antpitta Grallaria gigantea, Paz de las Aves.
Antpittas (not at all related to 'real' pittas) are a group of mostly ground-dwelling members of the uniquely South American funariids, notoriously hard to see anywhere - until the advent of Angel Paz.

Angel took to feeding the birds with worms. It took months, and persistence in the face of objections from his wife who suggested on more than one occasion that there were better ways of spending his time than feeding his forest chooks, but eventually individuals of four different antpitta species had become habituated. These birds are notoriously shy and hard to see, so the concept of them coming out to a group of visitors is remarkable.

Ochre-breasted Antpitta Grallaricula flavirostris, Paz de las Aves.

Juvenile Yellow-breasted Antpitta Grallaria flavotincta, Paz de las Aves.
Sorry, this is a shocking photo to show you (not much light, photo taken at a fifteenth of a second)
but I justify it by the rarity of the bird.

Angel has tried tempting them with worms from the garden, but they are adamant that free-range forest worms are best, requiring a lot of work on his part.

These are not the only birds he has patiently trained to come to his call to feed either. Dark-backed Wood-quail Odontophorus melanatus are New World quail, not related to the Old World quail; it is another heart-breaker of a bird to find normally - my trusty Ecuadorean field guide says it is normally encountered "only by chance". Not so at Paz de las Aves.

Dark-backed Wood-quail, Paz de las Aves, another dream-like encounter.
Here the attraction is not worms, but fruit.

By now nothing should surprise about Angel's abilities, but when I returned last year, the latest addition to his list of bird familiars still startled me. Tapaculos are another almost mythically skulking group of dense forest ground-dwellers, also funariids. A bird often heard in the Ecuadorean cloud forest where its piercing whistle carries long distances - but almost never seen - is the wonderfully named Ocellated Tapaculo Acropternis orthonyx, an unusually large and spectacularly coloured tapaculo.

Ocellated Tapaculo, Paz de las Antpittas.
As I sat within a very few metres of this extraordinary bird, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing.

Reserve managers now come to Angel from other parts of Ecuador and further afield to learn the tricks of the trade. I understand that different species of antpittas in Peru and Colombia at least are now being attracted by regular worm-feeding.

Angel's fruit-feeders attract many other very special forest birds too, especially at that period when the rainforest fruiting trees are drying up.

Black-chinned Mountain Tanager Anisognathus notabilis (above),
and Sickle-winged Guan Chamaepetes goudotii (below),
both succumbing to the lure of Angel's bananas.

I should note that the birds are in no way permitted to become dependent on the hand-outs, which are strictly limited. And there are of course many birds which do not have any interaction with people, but are present simply because of the excellent habitat. The remaining three photos, all taken at La Paz de las Aves, are of mostly indifferent quality, but they portray very special birds; I trust you will forgive me.

White-faced Nunbird Hapaloptila castanea, a very rarely encountered bird and this is the only one I've seen

Orange-breasted Fruit-eater Pipreola jucunda, a delightful little cotinga.

Toucan Barbets Semnornis ramphastinus, one of my favourite South American birds,
not least for their wonderful honking duets.
It has relatively recently been recognised that the New World barbets are not closely related to the Old World ones; the Toucan Barbet and one other species are now placed in another family again.

Today the Paz forest is a must for any visiting birders, the family is comfortably off, and they have diversified into fruit growing, which in turn attracts more birds. It is very hard to see a downside to the story, and I'm sure there will be more spinoffs as the word spreads further.

Try to visit Ecuador if you possibly can, and be sure to include a visit to La Paz de las Aves when you do so.

BACK ON MONDAY

Not really one of my intermittent series on colours in nature - though I'll come back for another of those soon enough - but rather in the footsteps of an earlier posting wherein I explored some of the often ingenious ways that taxonomists have come up with to describe, or sometimes just imply, black in a name. The field would seem to be even more wide open with red, since there is technically only one black, whereas we use 'red' loosely to cover a range of shades or even colours.

In the illustrations I've used here, we can see that taxonomists have not only used a variety of ways to describe red and similar colours, but have often used the same word to describe what we would probably see as very different colours. However to be fair, basic Latin words for red, notably rufus and ruber, meant either red or reddish when used by the Romans too. For instance, Red Kangaroo Paw and Rufous Treecreeper share the same species name (allowing for gender endings), but are not at all the same colour.

Red Kangaroo Paw Anigozanthus rufus, south-west Western Australia.

Rufous Treecreeper Climacteris rufa, Porongurup NP, Western Australia.

Ruber likewise means either red or reddish; here are some examples from each of three biological kingdoms!

Starfish or Stinkhorn Fungus Aseroe rubra.Found throughout eastern Australia and much of the Pacific,
this species apparently mimics an open wound,
in smell as well as appearance, to attract flies which disperse the spores!

Escallonia rubra, Family Escallionaceae, Salto Petrohue, southern Chile.

Red-tailed Tropicbird Phaethon rubricauda, nesting on Lady Elliott Island, Queensland.
Here the species name means exactly the same as the English name.

And for hedging bets, it would be hard to go past the next one, whose name potentially at least means 'reddish-ish'.

Blushing Tiny Greenhood Orchid Pterostylis (Speculantha) rubescens, Black Mountain, Canberra.

The Greek equivalent is eruthros/erythros, which also appears in both plant and animal names.

Red Bloodwood Eucalyptus erythrophloia, Cooktown, tropical Queensland.
The allusion is, like the common name's, to the wood, literally 'red-wood'.
(This is not the only eucalypt referred to as Red Bloodwood by the way.)

Red-kneed Dotterel Erythrogenys cinctus, Diamantina River, far western Queensland.
This time it's the genus name containing red, in combination, thus 'red-kneed' like the common name.
(And no, it's not really the knee, but we can discuss that another time.)
This single-species genus evolved on the inland waterways as Australia dried out in the last few million years.

Other words used have more specific meanings in the original, though this hasn't always apparently reflected the organism described. For instance kokkinos is the Greek (in transliteration) for scarlet, generally agreed to be a bit on the orange side of red.

Notro Embothrium coccineum Family Proteaceae, Torres del Paine NP, southern Chile.

Scarlet Banksia Banksia coccinea Family Proteaceae, near Albany, Western Australia.

Both these examples are pretty fair renderings of the colour as we understand it, but this isn't always the case when the Greek phoenicius is employed. This is usually translated as purplish-red, or even violet, so these examples might seem surprising.

Flame Robin Petroica phoenicia, Namadgi National Park near Canberra.
Here the common name seems more appropriate.

Bottlebrush Callistemon phoenicus, Cape le Grande NP, Western Australia.
Perhaps this one is a bit closer to the intent.

Then there are names based on allusion or analogy. The Latin ferrugineus refers to rusty iron, and some of the applications of this one again seem unexpected.

Diplolaena ferruginea Family Rutaceae, Badgingarra NP, Western Australia.
I guess here it depends on whether the author was looking at the more obvious red stamens
or the definitely rusty sepals.

Pimelea ferruginea, Woody Island, Western Australia.
I find this one distinctly odd! (The name, not the delightful flower.)

Andean Ruddy Duck Oxyura ferruginea, El Calafate, Argentina.
This one seems pretty unequivocal.

Austral Parakeet Enicognathus ferrugineus, Chilean Patagonia.
While it might seem a little strange to name the entire bird 'rusty' for the tail, the colour seems convincing enough.
This parrot is found further south than any other, way down to about 52 south, at the tip of South America.

Likewise the implication of the Latin sanguineus, bloody or blood-coloured, would seem pretty unequivocal, but not so it seems.

Dark-banded Greenhood Orchid Pterostylis sanguinea, Perth.
Maybe dried blood?

However, in other places it has been much more obviously appropriately-used.

Scarlet Honeyeater Myzomela sanguinolenta, Cape Hillsborough NP, Queensland.
Here the derived word sanguinolenta implies 'blood-filled'.

Of course names usually tell us more about ourselves than the organisms, but it can be fun - and sometimes even instructive - to explore them. Not to mention an excuse to introduce you to some plants and animals you might not have been familiar with.

BACK TOMORROW FOR A BRIEF POSTING TO SHARE SOME NEWS WITH YOU, BEFORE A MORE NORMAL ONE ON THURSDAY

I don't generally advertise here, but I thought my new book - co-authored with friend, colleague and linguist Jeannie Gray - might be of interest to those who read this blog.

It's been out for a little while, but I'm mentioning it now because it's just been awarded a Whitley Certificate of Commendation. I don't expect that to make you sit up and take notice, but in its own little field it's fairly prestigious. The Whitley Book Awards are granted annually by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for Australian zoological books published during the year; ours was judged to be "best book in the category Zoological Resource".

We believe it to be unique, and not just in Australia. Jeannie used her knowledge of Greek and Latin to elicit the meanings of names of every Australian bird species - family, genus and species - but perhaps more significantly tracked down and translated the original descriptions in a range of languages where there were ambiguities or uncertainties. I tried to extract every name ever used in English for each species, and to explain why. Needless to say we came across some great stories in the process. You won't be too surprised to hear that some of these contain some humour.

Anyway, that's enough skiting from me; here's the publisher's link to the book if you're interested.

Thanks for bearing with me; normal business will be resumed on Thursday!

Another in a sporadic series on more-than-usually remarkable bird bills; here's the link to the previous one in the series (and through it to earlier ones). As on that occasion, you get a special offer today - two for the price of one; both are parrots, and both are endemic to the south-west corner of Australia, long isolated from the rest of the continent by aridity and limestone plains. Quite independently, these two species have developed a highly specialised upper mandible, extremely slender and protruding - and both have done so for the same reason, to exploit a remarkably rich food resource, available all year round, provided by just one of the hundreds of species of eucalypts found in the south-west.

This species is Marri, Eucalyptus calophylla, found (most often in association with Jarrah, E. marginata) as a defining species in huge areas of dry eucalypt forest that dominate the south-west hinterland.

Marri-Jarrah dry forest near Bannister; the Jarrah has fibrous bark, the Marri's (see also below) is in little plates.

The food source that our (still anonymous) stars today are after however is found in the distinctive big fruits, in which hundreds of seeds are produced. The fruits can form all year round, and within them seeds continually ripen over a long period; each seed is tiny, but the overall resource is huge and is particularly important in winter when other food is scarcer.

Marri fruit, John Forrest National Park.
These impressive seed-producers can be 50mm long and 35mm wide; when ripe, they are also formidably tough.

A very few birds - notably Carnaby's Cockatoo Calyptorhynchus latirostris - have the tools to simply crush the fruit walls, but our subjects for today are more subtle than that.

Red-capped Parrot Purpureicephalus spurius, Albany,
a truly glorious bird, fairly large and the sole member of its genus.

The key feature of the Red-capped Parrot from our perspective however is the extended upper bill, fairly clear in this picture. Experienced older birds show great dexterity in nipping off the hard ripe Marri fruit, holding it in one claw, testing it and, if it is of good enough quality, rotating it while inserting the upper bill to extract the fruit. (Green fruit are simply chewed apart.) An earlier study found that 54% of Red-capped Parrots in winter had been eating Marri seed.

Today's second Oddbill is a very close relative of Carnaby's Cockatoo mentioned earlier; indeed Baudin's Cockatoo is virtually indistinguishable in the field - unless you can get close enough see the bill. The long-used names of Short-billed and Long-billed Black-Cockatoo in fact seem eminently more useful. Baudin's has a long slim upper mandible like the Red-capped's, and for exactly the same purpose.

Baudin's Cockatoos Calyptorhynchus baudinii (named for French commander Nicolas Baudin, leader of one the most splendid exporatory expeditions ever to visit Australia, in the first years of the 19th century),
Stirling Ranges National Park.
The special mandible is not as clear as it is in the Red-capped, largely because the bill is part-hidden in feathers; in this pair it can best be seen in the female on the left.

Baudin's Cockies are even more dependent on Marri than the Red-Capped Parrot, with wood-boring grubs comprising most of the rest of the diet. Like the Red-cappeds, they are experts at extracting the seeds without damaging the fruits. Unlike the Red-cappeds though, they are listed as Endangered, both by the IUCN and the Western Australian government. The single population is estimated to comprise between 10,000 and 15,000 birds; the main threat formerly was habitat clearance, while now it is regarded as a mix of loss of mature Marri trees (the key food source), competition for nesting hollows with feral Honeybee colonies, and illegal shooting (primarily by orchadists).

We can only hope that this superb product of evolution can survive our assaults on it.

TOMORROW I LEAVE TO ACCOMPANY A GROUP OF NATURALISTS TO ECUADOR; PLEASE DON'T FORGET ME - I'LL BE BACK HERE WITH ANOTHER POSTING ON FRIDAY 15 NOVEMBER

I'm just back from Ecuador - at least corporally, the whereabouts of my brain is more problematic - but any postings arising from that trip will have to wait until I've had a chance to process photos. Meantime however I'd like to offer another in my periodic series on favourite botanic gardens; see here for the most recent in the series (which links to the previous one, and so on), or check Botanic Gardens under Labels elsewhere on this page.

Alice Springs, in central Australia, has one of the most beautiful settings of any Australian town, set in the desert and nestled against the magnificent MacDonnell Ranges. Its chronic social problems are no secret, but it is still a place which demands and receives the loyalty and love of many people.

Location of Alice Springs, Northern Territory.

Alice Springs looking south from Anzac Hill to Heavitree Gap in the MacDonnell Ranges.
The Todd River - nearly always comprising dry sand - passes through the Gap.

In the east of the town (left of this photo) is one of my favourite parts of town, a peaceful haven called Olive Pink Botanic Gardens - the name might raise eyebrows but it commemorates one of the great characters of Australian history, though few outside of the Centre, or academic anthropological circles, will know of her.

Olive was born in Tasmania in 1884, studied art, and later taught it in Perth and Sydney. Her 'very dear friend' Captain Harold Southern died in the slaughterhouse of Gallipoli in 1915, and she remained single for the rest of her life. Retrenched during the Great Depression in the late 1920s from the New South Wales public service (where she designed posters for the Railways Department) she went sketching in the central deserts, became fascinated by the lives of Aboriginal people, and studied anthropology at Sydney University. The highly influential Adolphus Elkin assisted her to get Australian National Research Council grants to work among the Arrernte people of the central deserts and the Warlpiri of the western deserts. Her published work on the Arrernte was highly acclaimed, but she earned the wrath of the establishment by refusing to publish her Warlpiri studies because they included details of rituals not permitted to outsiders.

She worked to establish a 'secular sanctuary' for Warlpiri where they could come to terms with European encroachment without interference from state or church but was largely thwarted by the academic establishment, which used its influence to deny her access to many communities under government and church control. In Alice Springs she worked as a cleaner at the court house, constantly agitating for social justice for indigenous Australians, in pursuit of which she was unrelenting, 'difficult' and even vitriolic, though it is fair to say that she was probably cantankerous in other matters too. She lost her basic galvanised iron hut and her job, and lived for some years in a tent, finally setting it up on the land where the botanic gardens now stands; by the time she succeeded in getting the area gazetted as a flora reserve in 1956, with herself as Honorary Curator, she was already into her 70s.

That didn't stop her from working, with Warlpiri assistants, in developing the gardens until she died nearly 20 years later in 1975. When she settled there the land was badly degraded, with most of the shrub and tree cover gone. Famously she assigned names of dignitaries to trees she planted; when she wasn't getting the support she demanded for one of her causes she let the world know by ceasing to water the tree associated with the offending official!

After her death the Territory government took over the site and undertook extensive plantings, exclusively of central Australian species, track and 'theme habitat' construction and development of an interpretive centre. The gardens opened to the public in 1985.

My photos date from my most recent visit, when the area had experienced a run of dry years, so the gardens weren't looking their best - please trust me that they generally look more inviting than these images might suggest, as there was little of the natural herb understorey present. There is a feeling too that resources might not be all one might hope for at present. Of the 16 hectare site, only five hectares are planted; the rest, primarily comprising the adjacent hilly country, is regenerated bushland.

Red Cabbage Palm, Livistona mariae, which grows naturally only in nearby Palm Valley.

Interpretation is excellent, particularly with regard to traditional uses of the plants.

Eremophilas, or Emu Bushes or Fuchsia Bushes, one of the most widespread and beautiful of desert shrub groups, feature in the plantings.

Eremophila christophori, Christophor's Desert Fuchsia or Dolomite Fuchsia Bush, grows only in the Alice Springs area.

Eremophila polyclada, 'Flowering Lignum' for its superficial resemblance (at least when not flowering) to the entirely unrelated sprawling lignums, Muehlenbeckia spp. Its natural occurrence is a little further to the east.

There is an excellent little cafe where one can enjoyably relax while profitably watching the birds come and go to the artificial watering points in the rocks and to the foliage above.

Yellow-throated Miner Manorinaflavigula, a ubiquitous colonial honeyeater,
taking advantage of a little pipe-fed pool by the cafe.

Grey-crowned Babblers Pomatostomustemporalis, an engaging and highly social species, in the trees above the tables.
Australian babblers are not at all related to Old World babblers. (The apparently much larger bird on the right is simply all fluffed up after a dip.)

Perhaps the star bird turns of the gardens however are the Western Bowerbirds Chlamydera guttata, which have bowers near the carpark, though many visitors are unaware of them.

Male Western Bowerbird displaying to a rival male, showing off his normally hidden pink nape (it is only conspicuous when the neck feathers are raised).

The extraordinary bower, his display arena, decorated with bones, shells, flowers and plastic scraps.
The remarkable bowerbirds deserve, and will receive, their own story here one day; for now, just make sure to look them up when you visit!

Next time you go to central Australia - and I hope it's in your plans - you will inevitably spend some time in 'the Alice'. When you do so, please put time aside for a visit, or two, to the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens, one of its true treasures.

BACK ON WEDNESDAY

One of my very first postings in this blog asked the question "When is a REALLY lousy photo OK?". My suggested answer to the question then was "when it's the only way to properly tell a story that I think is worth telling". Today, as you may have divined, that situation raises its head again.

The omnivorous family Procyonidae of the Americas (in the Order Carnivora) includes some familiar species, including raccoons and coatis.

South American Coatis Nasua nasua, Manu National Park, Peru.
A widespread and relatively familiar procyonid.

Among the less familiar species is the Olingo Bassaricyon spp. - I use that term because at least until very recently there was some considerable confusion and dispute as to just what constituted an Olingo. Some authorities recognised just one, while others separated out the central American olingos from those of north-western South America.

Northern Olingo Bassacaryon gabbi, Costa Rica.
Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Recently the olingo specialists, generally working around Kristofer Helgen at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, did a thorough survey of museum specimens and studied their DNA. It was not particularly startling when they determined that the lowland forms east and west of the Andes apparently represent separate species; others had already suggested that. What was a surprise was their growing realisation that a quite different species of olingo inhabited the cloud forests of the northern Andes, from Colombia to Ecuador and at elevations of 1500 to 2700 metres above sea level.

Cloud forest at its most typical, Bellavista Lodge, north-western Ecuador.

Museum specimens had been lumped with lowland olingos (though one New York zoologist came close to the truth in the 1920s, but didn't ever publish). It transpired that one had even been exhibited in US zoos in the 1960s and 70s, where it understandably declined to breed with 'other' olingos. Helgen's group realised that cloud forest olingo specimens were consistently smaller, redder and heavier-furred than lowland ones with different dentition; they were named 'Olinguito' (little olingo). A targeted expedition to the historical range actually did find the animal in the wild; in August 2013 a publication officially named it Bassaricyon neblina (ie 'misty'), the first new species of carnivore to be named from the Americas in 35 years.

I'd followed the story with some excitement, but never dreamed that I might have the opportunity to actually meet the Olinguito when I went back to Ecuador last month. However it turned out that Bellavista Lodge (where the above photo of prime Olinguito habitat was taken) had been hosting visits from its local Olinguitos for some time, first when they began sharing in the hummingbirds' nectar from the feeders and later when they were offered bananas at an elevated feeding platform.

It was one of the most amazing wildlife offers I'd ever received when our group was invited to come and observe a pair of this very special animal coming down to this feeder at night. This brings me back to my opening comments on lousy photos - obviously enough no flash is permitted and my basic little camera was struggling. Nonetheless I think this is one of those occasions when sharing poor photos is justified - so far not many people have had the opportunity to see the Olinguito in the wild and I think that in that circumstance almost any pic is better than none. (And in any case you can easily find better ones on the web!)

Above and below; wild Olinguito coming to sample some banana at Bellavista Lodge, north-western Ecuador.

Probably in due course other cloud forest lodges will discover they live with Olinguitos too but meantime Bellavista might be one of your few realistic chances of seeing one! And of course the question, yet again, is 'what else is out there?'...

BACK ON MONDAY

I think it's fair to say that, for most people, flamingoes suggest Africa, and with pretty good cause. Even if only gleaned from the telly, most of us have pretty powerful mind images of millions of breeding flamingoes in the great salt lakes of the rift valley of the east, though for me at least the image of hundreds of flamingoes adorning the Strandfontein sewage works in Cape Town, with Table Mountain as a backdrop, is an abiding one. However flamingoes - Greater and Lesser - can pop up almost anywhere in Africa outside of the dry northern hinterland.

Lesser Flamingoes Phoeniconaias minor, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

However they are also an important part of the landscape of parts of the Americas too, though in North America only as far north in general as eastern Mexico. Indeed, there are more American species than African ones - four all told. For those unfamiliar with these American birds there is another surprise too - while most of us probably think of flamingoes as warm weather birds, they live way down to nearly 50 degrees south in Patagonia, or up to nearly 5000 metres above sea level in the central Andes.

Chilean Flamingoes Phoenicopterus chilensis, above and below,
Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia.

Chilean Flamingoes belong to the same genus as the Greater Flamingo of Africa (and southern Europe and southern Asia), though the two Andean species - Andean and James's or Puna Flamingoes - are assigned to a different genus Phoenicoparras. Presumably the ancestors of American flamingoes arrived relatively recently and the two high mountain species evolved in that very different world - or perhaps their ancestor arrived first, and the Chilean's more recently. Given the existence of seven million year old fossil flamingo footprints in the Andes I suspect the latter. (At least I keep coming across that 'fact' but haven't yet found the original source of it.) I don't suppose their exact origin matters much, though I'm always intrigued by such things.

The fourth American species is more conventional in living in tropical and subtropical areas, especially around the Caribbean and in the Galapagos. Traditionally it was regarded as a subspecies of the Greater Flamingo, but more and more it is now seen as a species in its own right, though still closely related - called, without much imagination, American Flamingo Phoenicopterus ruber.

American Flamingoes at sunset, Floreana, Galapagos.

Overall we don't really know where to 'put' flamingoes; they are an ancient group, with affinities to other waterbirds, notably grebes, ducks herons and other waders, but having been around for some 30 million years this is not surprising. The general - but not universal - view now is that they are separate enough to merit their own Order, Phoenicopteriformes.

They certainly have some very special characteristics, not least being their extraordinary approach to feeding. Try to imagine (but only imagine it, I'd recommend!) eating with your head upside down, so your bill - or equivalent - is pretty much horizontal.

American Flamingo feeding, Isabela, Galapagos.

What the bird in this photo is doing it to separating water and unwanted muddy particles from food items using a large, fatty, highly sensitive tongue with numerous fleshy protuberances (lamellae), complemented by a keeled bill also fringed with fleshy lamellae. The tongue is used as a pump which beats from five to 20 times a minute to suck in beakfuls of muddy water and wrigglies and to expel unwanted gunk via a complex set of movements.

This diet, comprising algae, small fish and invertebrates, leads to another spectacular aspect of flamingoes, their glorious colour.

American Flamingo, Isabela, Galapagos.
In terms of its colour, this bird is definitely what it eats. Its glowing reds and pink are due to carotenoids, derived entirely from its food, and in particular the blue-green algae and shrimps.

In captivity flamingoes on artificial diets gradually fade to grey - which is also the colour of flamingo chicks. Zoos overcome this by adding canthaxanthin to their diets, a carotenoid pigment found naturally in mushrooms, algae, bacteria and some fish - and less naturally in (mostly illegal) 'tanning pills'.

Chilean Flamingoes, east of Coyaique near the Chile-Argentina border in the central Andes.
The striking black wing tips are due to melanin, which confers resistance to wear and is thus found
in the flight feathers of many birds.

And while on the subject of flamingo food, in all the world of birds only flamingoes and pigeons have evolved (quite independently of each other) a 'milk' on which to feed their young. Now you're right of course - it's not really milk, which is by definition a mammalian trick. However, like 'real' milk both pigeon and flamingo 'milk' is a fatty protein produced by glands; that of flamingoes is fattier and has less protein than that of pigeons. Rather than exuding it from external glands, both flamingoes and pigeons produce their 'milk' internally - from the upper digestive tract and the crop respectively. And, both can do what no mammal can - produce it by both parents.

I am a massive fan of flamingoes - as you may have guessed - and I regret that I only missed by a miserable couple of million years the chance to enjoy them in Australia. We had at least seven species in four genera, including our own endemic genus Phoeniconotius, and the ubiquitous Greater Flamingo. It was only the great drying which began about two million years back which led to their extinction, by eliminating the vast inland wetlands.

Nonetheless, my self-centred regret won't bring them back and it's yet another reason to explore other parts of this wonderful world. Next time you go flamingo-spotting, remember the South American option too...

American Flamingoes at sunset, Floreana, Galapagos.

BACK ON THURSDAY

Bénoué National Park

On This Day, 1 August: Switzerland's National Day

Hover Craft

An Alphabet of Yellow Flowers

On This Day, 12 August: deathday of Samuel Goodenough

Darwin's Famous (Un)Finches

On This Day, 21 August; Augustus Gregory's birthday

Magnificent Murchison (the Australian one!)

Apology from Australia

Crossing the Nullarbor

Living on the Nullarbor

On This Day, 8 October; birth of William Swainson - parrot and goose

When Nature Satirises Art...

Refugio Paz de las Aves; a good news ecotourism story

Fifty Shades of Red

Australian Bird Names; a new book

Oddbills 4

Olive Pink Botanic Gardens; legacy of a remarkable woman

Enter Olinguito

The 'Other' Flamingoes