Friday, May 23, 2008
Kingfishers' king fishers
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Catching prey and flights of fancy
A digression into the world of entertainment. The lagoon treats water from the largest sugar cane mill in the Southern Hemisphere. Baz Luhrman's latest offering, Australia, features a small railway engine. That engine was puffing away at CSR's mill today, as part of an annual Italian festival in town. Small worlds?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Some slither, some hop, some fly ...
An Amethyst Python takes a discriminating taste of the air as some big heat-emitter gets in the way at Tyto Wetlands. Couldn't photograph fast enough to stop all movement of tongue. The glistening 3.5 metre snake radiated plump health. After a few more flickers of tongue it untensed and unhurriedly went on its way.

An Agile Wallaby takes a thoughtful bite on the breakfast of choice for champion hoppers - tender grass. The 90-hectare wetlands nourish and shelter hundreds of the species. Agiles bound along athletically enough, but more impressive marsupial agility is shown by various rock wallabies.
Black Kite takes a turn across Tyto's main lagoon. These birds lost out to northern counterparts for rights to the more accurate descriptive title of Fork-tailed Kites. Another unknowing casualty in taxonomy's name games. Yes, I know, it's serious and essential work.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Rainbows and Rainbow Serpents
The Rainbow Serpent's shaping of all land and waterways is a foundation stone of much Aboriginal mythology, thus it winds back 50,000 to 60,000 years.
The snake that seems most likely to have inspired the many tales among more than two hundred language groups - most now long lost - is limited in Australia to a thin northeastern area (roughly 1000km x 100km).
Amethyst Pythons also inhabit Papua New Guinea and parts of Indonesia. So there may be clues to the path to Australia by the first Aborigines in the distribution of Morelia amethistina.
But snake fossils are rare because the bones are so fragile. The pythons perhaps had a wider range across northern Australia that has vanished over, say, the last 30,000 years.
Also known as Scrub Python, the snake is now rarely over five metres long. Old reports of 8m snakes seem founded on stretched, sloughed skins. However, a living specimen in the pioneering sugar cane farming days of the 1890s was measured at 7m. Shipped south to Sydney in a barrel, it was reported to have overheated and died.
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