Environment

Jewel in the crown land

Environment / / 6 minutes of reading

On the edge of a thin strip of roadside vegetation, a man in the far end of his 80s peers up into the canopy of a bulloak tree.

A minute speck flashes high above him. “Here’s a Bulloak Jewel! It’s a male, you got it?” he calls out.

He wears no glasses or binoculars, but the eyes of legendary lepidopterist Dr Don Sands are undiminished. So is his enthusiasm.

His research assistant, ecologist Matthew Head, tracks the speck, eyes darting. He wields a hefty 600mm lens. “Look at the size of that monstrous subtropical butterfly,” he mutters drily.

It is hardly bigger than a thumbnail. “C’mon mate … Ah no, don’t go over there!” Eventually it perches, high and vigilant.

We are at Ellangowan Nature Refuge, a 1.5km stretch of road near the one-pub town of Leyburn, on the Darling Downs of south-east Queensland.

This tiny, unprepossessing patch of scrub is home to one of Australia’s most endangered insects. Even here, it is incredibly vulnerable.

Between the 50 metres that separate the road and private property, gnarled, burnt-orange angophora trees predate the arrival of Europeans by centuries. There hasn’t been a fire here for a long time. But the trees are scarred by old lightning strikes, leaving hollows and stumps that have been colonised by a very special ant on which the butterfly depends.… Read more..

Frog-hopping up the charts

Environment, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

A range of amphibious grunts, clicks, squeals and screams from more than 60 species of Australian frogs has landed at No. 3 on the ARIA album charts – with hopes of knocking off Paul Kelly and Taylor Swift to take the top spot.

Brought together by the Bowerbird Collective (musicians Anthony Albrecht and Simone Slattery) under the banner Songs Of Disappearance, the project is raising funds for the Australian Museum’s FrogID project, with the aim of bringing attention to the plight of Australian frogs.

Recorded by experts and citizen scientists, it reprises last year’s project – an album led by a symphony of Australian bird calls – which peaked at No. 2.

While Australia holds the dubious honour of being host to the worst mammal extinction rate of any country on Earth, our frogs are also in dire straights due to habitat loss, climate change and chytrid fungus disease.

… Read more..

Vote 1 Palm Cockatoo

Environment / / 3 minutes of reading

They have shaggy crests and bright scarlet cheeks. They bow, sway, stamp their feet and spread their wings in a Jesus Christ pose, justifying their status. They whistle and whoop. Males even use their enormous beaks to fashion tree branches into drumsticks, which they use to beat on tree hollows approaching the breeding season.

They are Palm Cockatoos: the largest cockatoo in the world, weighing in up to 1.2kg – lovingly known as “rockatoos” for their punk mohawks, vocal dexterity and percussive talents. And Birds Queensland has officially nominated them as the mascot of the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games, pointing out that previous Australian Olympic mascots have mostly been mammals.

They say it’s time to give a bird a go – but it’s not the only one in the running. The Queensland tourism minister, Stirling Hinchliffe, has already proposed the humble and familiar “bin chicken” (Australian White Ibis). But the ibis’s dumpster-diving habits and distinctive odour doesn’t make it an easy sell to international visitors.

So, why the Palm Cockatoo? Unlike ibis, the cockatoos are unique to Far North Queensland in Australia, living in the remote savannahs of Cape York. (They are more widespread in New Guinea and the Indonesian Aru Islands, so Birds Queensland is encouraging the government to involve our neighbours in celebrations, using the cockatoo as a tool of soft diplomacy.)… Read more..

Starling murmurations: a fragment of eternity

Environment / / 3 minutes of reading

Søren Solkær was 10 when he witnessed his first starling murmuration, on the west coast of Denmark: more than 100,000 birds, making movies in the sky as they were being corralled by a falcon. It would be nearly 40 years before the photographer, best known for intimate, often playful portraits of artists and musicians, would revisit this scene of his youth, setting aside a week to capture the birds in motion.

That was five years ago, and Solkær hasn’t stopped, making the murmurations the subject of an exhibition and book, Black Sun. “I’ve pretty much done it every winter ever since, and I don’t have any plans of stopping anytime soon,” he says. Before then, and despite his childhood awakening, Solkær had never turned his lens to birds. “I still don’t photograph individual birds, because I don’t find it visually interesting to just depict a bird, it doesn’t interest me artistically.”

In fact, there are eight individual portraits of starlings in Black Sun. Solkær says that was to give colour and context to the bigger picture, “because they really look like small dots of ink in my big photographs. I wanted to show that they’re really beautiful, metallic birds.”… Read more..

Brisbane floods, February-March 2022

Environment, Life Stories / / 4 minutes of reading

The things that will stay with me about the weather event and subsequent flooding that engulfed Brisbane and south-east Queensland over the weekend was how rapidly it unfolded, its capricious unpredictability and extreme violence.

This was not a repeat of the 2011 disaster, which I also lived through, and the captains of hindsight suggesting this – in a simplistic and premature attempt to assign blame – are making a false equivalence.

I live on the second floor of a low-lying, poorly drained apartment block in the university suburb of St Lucia, 150 metres as the crow flies from the Brisbane River. In 2011, there was time for the city to prepare. The floods then felt like a train wreck in slow motion.

This event began slowly, and for a couple of days in Brisbane early last week the predicted heavy falls did not eventuate. Instead, a trough sat just south of Fraser Island, dumping huge amounts of rain on Gympie and the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

But as the week progressed, the developing low-pressure system (to coin a phrase from Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs) gathered momentum like a piano falling out of a window. There was no comprehending the sound and fury that was about to pulverise us.… Read more..

Songs of Disappearance

Environment, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

An album consisting entirely of birdsong has debuted towards the top of Australia’s ARIA chart, beating Mariah Carey, Michael Buble and Abba to get to No. 5 one week after its release.

Songs Of Disappearance, a collaboration between multimedia duo Bowerbird Collective and David Stewart, who has been recording the sounds of Australian birds for over four decades, features the calls and songs of 53 threatened species.

With all proceeds donated to BirdLife Australia, it has sold just over 2,000 units, around 1,500 of them in presale (which is, it must be said, a far cry from the kind of numbers trequired to enter the charts before the streaming era).

The project was the result of a conversation between Bowerbird Collective’s Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, and his supervisor Stephen Garnett, the author of the recently updated Action Plan For Australian Birds, which found that one in six Australian birds are now threatened with extinction.

“He asked whether the Bowerbird Collective could do anything to help promote [the Action Plan], and it was immediately obvious to me what we needed to do,” Albrecht said. “I’m really keen to understand whether environmental art such as this project can have an impact on attitudes and behaviour.”… Read more..

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