Housekeeping; updating some earlier postings
This may be of little interest to anybody, but I find constantly that people are visiting older postings, so I skim through them a couple of times a year and update as required. Mostly this means...
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Those South American 'Geese'
For me at least, one of the highlights of a visit to the far south of South America - loosely known as Patagonia, incorporating the southern extremities of Chile and Argentina - is the presence across...
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Tinderry Temptations
I guess we all know of a place - an alluring road we pass the end of, or a walking track we mean to explore, or a sign to a lookout - with which we're familiar to the extent of promising ourselves...
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Banksias - grand and beautiful old Australians
(My apologies for this late posting; I was only just getting into it yesterday afternoon when I received a phone call to tell me that one of the first White-winged Black Terns ever reported in the ACT...
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Lauca National Park - extraordinarily high and highly extraordinary
Until this year my experiences of Chile had been in the far south, plus stop-overs in Santiago. In September however I had the opportunity to explore some of the far 'other end' of Chile, 4,000...
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Beasts of Many Hues
As the year is winding down, I seem to be too, so forgive me if I don't go into any great depth in this, my antepenultimate posting for the year. I've had some fun in the past looking at colours in...
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Kosciuszko in December
I've just realised, with something of a shock, that it is now nearly three years since we last went to Kosciuszko National Park, subsequent to which I wrote a series of three postings on this wonderful...
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Farewell to 2015!
As I have made traditional, to mark the changing of years I've selected just one photo from each month of 2015 to commemorate the year past. As ever I don't make any pretences to photographic...
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Australian Parrots and Cockies; some one-hit wonders
It seems appropriate to start the year with an Australian topic, and this is one that's been on my mind for a while. Australia (which includes New Guinea for most biological purposes) is a world...
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Aguas Verdes; another good news bird ecotourism story
Some time ago, I told the remarkable story of Angel Paz and his cloud forest property Paz de las Aves on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Ecuador. I won't retell his story here - please...
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Glorious Grevilleas
In recent times I've begun a sporadic series on the old Gondwanan family Proteaceae, with emphasis on the Australian ones. The most recent one was on Banksias, which you can see here if you missed it....
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Tyto Wetlands: Ingham's highlight
Ingham is a sugar town in tropical Queensland, and a place where you'd probably not choose to spend a lot of time on your way to more salubrious spots further north. You won't find it hard however to...
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Gulls; the wailers
'Gull' is a strange word, one of those back-formed in English through both misunderstanding and attempted Anglicisation of a foreign word. (Think of Spanish naranja, heard by English ears as 'an...
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Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Part 1, Mweya Lodge.
It's been far too long since I offered a post about Africa (and even longer since I've been there!). I can rectify the former more readily however. Queen Elizabeth National Park was declared in 1952,...
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Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Part 2; across the plains
This is the second installment of my tribute to this magnificent east-central African park. The first part can be read here. With 198,000 hectares, there's a lot of exploring to do by vehicle and...
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Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. Part 3; the Kazinga Channel
This is the third of a series on this magnificent national park in far western Uganda; the series began here. The Kazinga Channel is a broad natural channel which joins the much smaller Lake George to...
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An Alphabet of Red Flowers
Quite some time ago now I had fun compiling an alphabet of yellow flowers, and have been promising myself another indulgence some time by doing the same with red ones. Today it's warm enough - 35...
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The Great Western Woodlands; a botanical cornucopia. Part 1.
It is probably fair to say that most Australians are entirely unaware of one of the world's most important temperate woodlands, even though many people drive through them on the seemingly...
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The Great Western Woodlands; a botanical cornucopia. Part 2.
In my last post, I introduced this wonderful vast area of semi-arid woodland, apparently the largest such tract of near-pristine Mediterranean climate woodland in the world - 160,000 square kilometres...
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A Perusal of Pigeons. Part 1.
As any regular reader of this blog will have noticed, I tend to alternate between featuring a place or area, and then specific animals or plants. This is the turn of the latter, and it feels like time...
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