It’s a story almost too preposterous to believe, starring a group of young uni students, an infamous state premier, a legendary Australian poet and an extinct frog which gave birth by vomiting its young – all at the dawn of the Australian conservation movement. Yet the tale of the Southern Gastric-brooding Frog, which once inhabited […]
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In March, as Cyclone Alfred roared towards the south-east Queensland coast, the bayside suburbs of Brisbane were treated to a rare cold-water visitor. A Shy Albatross was spotted offshore, opposite a fishmonger in Sandgate. A couple of days later, what was likely to be the same bird flopped into a front yard of nearby Banyo, exhausted.
Bird of the year 2025: Vote 1 Shy Albatross Read More »
It had been three months without a peep, and the ecologist Matt Herring thought Gloria had perished. He had captured the elusive bird on 22 October 2023, on a property north of Balranald in New South Wales – the first Australian Painted-snipe to be fitted with a satellite tracker. But contact had been lost, and there
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For 100 years, the Night Parrot was the undisputed mystery bird of Australian ornithology. Until the discovery and subsequent study of a tiny population in Queensland’s far west in 2013, two specimens found by the side of remote outback roads in 1990 and 2006, also in Queensland, were the only hard evidence of its continued
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In 1996, Dr John Stanisic, then curator of invertebrates at the Queensland Museum, was doing a routine environmental impact assessment near Taroom in southern central Queensland, some 380 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. The purpose of Stanisic’s survey was to check for rare and threatened species around an impoundment for the proposed Nathan Dam, on the