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Wildlife of the National Botanic Gardens
Recently I paid a tribute to the Australian National Botanic Gardens, to me the most significant and most beautiful of the national institutions. (These things are purely subjective, and I also...
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Kosciuszko National Park #1: on top of Australia
As foreshadowed last time, we have just spent an exhilarating weekend in Kosciuszko National Park, best known for its protection of the highest parts of Australia, the alpine areas around Mount...
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Kosciuszko National Park #2; to tree or not to tree?
In my last posting I talked a bit about this significant alpine and montane park, but I couldn't do it justice in one entry, so here's a bit more, specifically on trees - where and why they aren't, and...
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Kosciuszko National Park #3; some inhabitants
This is the third - and last - of my postings based on our delightful weekend (last weekend) in Kosci, as it's affectionately known here. The high country in summer is rich in flowers and insects...
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Huntress in the House
I suspect that if I were rather smaller - the size of a silverfish say - I would find this a pretty terrifying prospect. I probably wouldn't be given much time to consider the matter however. Female...
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Red, Black and Conspicuous
It's been a while now since my last posting on colours in nature - red on that occasion - wherein I promised to get back to look at some of the many organisms, especially birds, which combine red and...
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Seeking Hides
A rule of mine when travelling is never to drive past a sewage pond without visiting to see what birds are there. (You'd be astonished how many visitor information centres have no idea where their...
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Oddbills 3
This is the third in a sporadic series on bird bills that are even more remarkable than this wonderful organ normally is. The previous offering in this series can be found here.Today you get two for...
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From Monga to Gondwana (via some orchids)
Last November I waxed lyrical about one of my favourite national parks, Monga, which is just off the highway on the way from Canberra to the coast at Batemans Bay - a well-trodden route indeed in this...
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Walking the Malabar Cliffs; the end of Lord Howe
As I have mentioned before, Lord Howe Island is a very special place. One very memorable walk is along the tops of the Malabar Cliffs at the north end of the main island. It's a bit of a climb, but...
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Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Gardens; treasure at the coast
I suspect that the majority of Canberrans make the 150km journey across the edge of the Monaro Plains, through historic Braidwood and down the steep curves of forested Clyde Mountain to Batemans Bay at...
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March of the Orchids
I don't generally think of March as being a good time for orchids around here, but when I started to go through my records, I decided that I might be wrong. In this part of the world at least, it's not...
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Meet the Great Greenhoods!
In my last posting I featured a few greenhood orchids, but I realised later that they probably won't be familiar to readers outside of Australia, and even to many people living here. I thought I might...
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Flood Bugs on the Move
On two occasions in western Queensland, I've come across vast numbers of what we in Australia call 'slaters' moving along roadsides in the cracking black-soil country; both occasions followed rains....
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Musing on Emus
As Gondwana was breaking up 100 million years ago, after half a billion years of comprising one mighty southern land, many of the most familiar elements of our living world were developing, including...
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The Blues; nature's trompe d'oeil #1
I think it's time to introduce another chapter in our intermittent discussion of Colours in Nature - you can find the others from that most recent one. As soon as I started preparing for some musings...
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The Blues: nature's trompe d'oeil #2
As promised in the last posting, I'm going to continue talking about beautifully blue animals and, as in our exploration of blue feathers, virtually none of the sky-coloured feet, beaks, skins, and...
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Lake Mburo National Park
Lake Mburo National Park was the last park I visited in a very memorable trip to Uganda (mostly birding, though by no means just that) a couple of years back. It wasn't the most dramatic place I saw,...
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A Tale of Two (Ant) Cities
This is the story - or rather two stories - of two very different groups of tropical rainforest ants, in two continents, which have in common only that they do remarkable things with leaves, and are...
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Natural History Book Reviews
This is an 'out of session' post to draw your attention to another project of mine, a periodic series of reviews of natural history related books, which I email, but which are also posted on the...
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