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A Perusal of Pigeons. Part 2.
Last time I talked a bit about the overall family characteristics of Columbidae - better known to their friends as pigeons and doves. Today I want to complete the story by going though the major...
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A Perusal of Pigeons. Part 3, Australia.
This is the third (and finally the final!) part of a series looking at the world's pigeons and doves. If you missed earlier episodes, they began here with an overview. The second part looked at the...
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On This Day 8 April 200 years ago: Charles Fraser arrived
There are a lot of what we might consider the basics that we don't know about Charles Fraser, though we do know that he arrived in Sydney on 8 April 1816 and went on to contribute much to our knowledge...
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Heights and Depths: Peru's Colca Valley
Colca Canyon is much-publicised as one of the deepest canyons in the world; only the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon is deeper. Colca's deepest point is 3.4 kilometres below the rim, twice the depth of the...
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Have a Hakea
This is the fourth in a sporadic series on plants of the great Gondwanan family Proteaceae; it began here, but it might be easiest to go the most recent instalment, on grevilleas, and follow the links...
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Uluru: at the heart of Australia
There are some places that just feel intrinsically special. For me - and very many others - Uluru is such a place. Sometimes when we finally visit a place that we've heard about for so long, the...
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Colours in Nature: gingery shades 1
It's been a while now since I did my last posting in the ongoing but irregular series on colours in nature; that one was the third in a series of orange in animals, a topic that gave me some angst, in...
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Colours in Nature: gingery shades 2 - mammals
In my last post I started a new thread in my irregular series on colours in nature, by featuring birds with 'rufous' or 'chestnut' in their names; I wonder if you were as surprised as I was how many...
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Colours in Nature; gingery shades 3 - reptiles and invertebrates
Here is the third - and for now at least the last, though there is another in the offing - in this instalment of the occasional series on colours in nature. Starting here I've been looking at shades...
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Cobbold Gorge: a Gulf Country secret
I only recently discovered the concept of 'infinity pools' - I don't doubt that they're old hat to you, but just in case, they're an above-ground swimming pool from which you can look out across the...
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Bako; a lovely little Bornean park
A lot of people these days seem to visit Malaysian Borneo, with their focus mostly on Sabah - mighty Mount Kinabalu, the Orangutan and Sun Bear rehabilitation centres at Sepilok, the grim Second World...
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Eremophilas; the desert lovers
I am on record as being a passionate orchid-lover (even an orchiholic) but other groups of plants put up a pretty good case for my affections too. I love arid lands (which is as well for an...
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San Pedro de Atacama; an astonishing part of the world. Part 1, Deep Desert.
The far north of Chile is some 4,500km from the cold wet windy south - but in some ways it feels even further. The mighty Atacama Desert is unlike anywhere else on earth, though near to the sea it has...
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San Pedro de Atacama; an astonishing part of the world. Part 2, desert lakes
In my last posting I introduced some of the spectacular Atacama Desert landscapes in the far north of Chile, in the San Pedro de Atacama area; if you missed that you might like to have a quick look, as...
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On This Day 6 July 1781: Stamford Raffles Born
I could almost as well have posted this yesterday, as Raffles died on 5 July 1826, a day short of his 45th birthday.You may well be wondering however why I would be including a posting on a British...
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East Point Reserve, Darwin
From Canberra in winter, lovely tropical Darwin always seems attractive. And so it does today as I write this. If you are fortunate enough to be visiting there some time in the nearish future, and...
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Colours in Nature; gingery shades 4 - more Australian birds
A while ago now I started another in my sporadic series on colours in nature, this one on the range of rich red-brown colours which we refer to variously as rufous, copper, chestnut and rusty among...
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Colours in Nature; gingery shades 5 - overseas birds
It's turned into something of an odyssey, but here is the final episode in this series celebrating animals with colours we variously refer to as chestnut, ginger, rusty, rufous or copper among others....
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Ferdinand von Mueller; botanical giant
It's now 120 years since Ferdinand von Mueller, the colossus of 19th century Australian botany, died. And it's high time I paid him some tribute here!Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich Mueller, in his role as...
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Ferdinand von Mueller's Collectors
In my last post I paid tribute, albeit an utterly inadequate one, to 19th century Australia's towering figure of botany, Ferdinand von Mueller. As discussed there he described some 2,000 species of...
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