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Surviving Winter in the Snow Country
It's been pretty bitter round our part of the world of late; at 600 metres above sea level, and at the foot of often snowy mountains, we expect cold winters but somehow this one seems harsher than...
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On This Day, 21 July: Belgian National Day
1830 was a restive time in western Europe, with one branch of the French monarchy overthrowing another, and southern parts of the United Netherlands deciding they no longer wished to be quite so...
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Kota Kinabalu, naturally
As mentioned previously, I've recently returned from a somewhat unexpected visit to Malaysian Borneo, and in that previous posting I promised more material from that exciting experience. Here's the...
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Pacha Quindi: a very special place
In Quichua, the language once spoken by the Incas and still spoken by many indigenous Ecuadorians, Pacha Quindi means 'place of the hummingbirds'. It's not hard to see why Tony Nunnery and Barbara Bolz...
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Botanic Gardens of Regional Queensland; Emerald and Goondiwindi
It's been a while since I posted another in my sporadic series of favourite botanic gardens, so I thought I'd compensate today with two for the price of one, both of which I visited (one for the first...
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Xanthorrhoeas; the wonderful grass-trees
Well actually they're not grasses, and only ambiguously trees, but Xanthorrhoea is never going to catch on as a common name, and the old name of 'blackboy' (for the supposed resemblance of the...
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Across the Barkly Tableland: a great drive
One of the great drives in Australia, in my opinion only of course, is across the great wild extent of the Barkly Tableland in the north-east of the Northern Territory. It's sealed all the way, so a...
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Mount Field, a Tasmanian Treasure
Back in 1885, just 13 years after Yellowstone National Park in the USA became the world's first national park, and only six years after Royal National Park in Sydney became Australia's first and the...
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Some Acacia Curiosities; wattle they think of next?
Acacias are fundamental to Australian landscapes, though we sometimes forget here that they are equally characteristic of many African ones. Mulga Acacia aneura woodland, Chambers Pillar, central...
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Spotlight on Small Game in Borneo
The Nanga Sumpa Lodge is a highlight of a visit to Sarawak in northern Borneo. Run by the local Iban community it is relatively basic, but clean and comfortable - I've seen much worse elsewhere - in a...
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Colours in Nature - orange; birds
Time for another in my sporadic series of Colours in Nature; for the most recent, see here and you can work back from there. Alternatively, go to Labels to the right of this posting, and look for...
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Colours in Nature; orange - other vertebrates
In the last posting we talked about orange in animals, focussing on birds. I raised there the problems of precisely defining orange, and I think that becomes even trickier in mammals. For instance by...
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Colours in Nature: orange - invertebrates
Back from another wonderful trip to South America - you'll be seeing more on that very soon - so this offering is 'live' again. Last time, in looking at some orange reptiles and frogs, I mentioned the...
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Pisagua; town of ghosts and birds
Pisagua is now a fishing village of only a couple of hundred people on the Atacama Desert coast of northern Chile. Only a century ago however it was one Chile's great ports, hosting internationally...
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Proteaceae; the form-changers from Gondwana
I thought it was time to write something more Australian than I've done recently, and it being gloriously spring here at last (and unsurprisingly, with each year spring becomes more precious) flowers...
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Mareeba Wetlands: sweeter than sugar
There is a constant tension in near-coastal Queensland between the sugar cane industry and reaction to its impacts on ever-dwindling natural tropical and sub-tropical habitat, from rainforest to...
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American Camels
I think some people are surprised to realise that there are camels in America. Even more, I suspect, are taken aback to learn that camels actually arose in North America, some 45 million years ago....
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Leaf Beetles and Mobile Homes
I had no intention of talking about leaf beetles today - indeed I scarcely knew anything about them and the idea had never occurred to me. Until Sunday.On Sunday I was walking with some like-minded...
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Pomac; a gem of northern Peru
The key focal points for most people's visit to Peru are either high in the Andes - Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, the cloud forests - or to the east in the Amazon basin, in the lowland rainforests....
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Southern Tablelands Ecosystems Park; a tucked-away treasure
In the last days of 2001 fires roared through exotic pine plantations scant kilometres from the centre of Canberra. Just 13 months later a far greater conflagration swept away 500 homes and most of the...
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