Environment

Twitch and shout

Environment, Miscellaneous / / 7 minutes of reading

For a bird-watching exercise, you don’t see a lot of birds on the Twitchathon. If you’ve never heard of this obscure sporting event, it’s a race: teams of birders pile into their cars and tear around the state, attempting to see or hear as many species as possible within an eight or 24-hour period. Because time is of the essence, once a bird’s call is recognised, actually spotting it becomes redundant. It’s on the list: go!

For this year’s Victorian event on 7-8 November, coordinated by Birdlife Australia as a fundraiser for endangered species, I was in one of the handful of 24-hour teams: the Manky Shearwaters. (It’s a pun on a type of seabird, the Manx Shearwater.) Others were in the more civilised eight-hour race: the Lame Ducks; the Filthy Flockers, the Soft Cockatiels. I’m not sure what lends birders towards this kind of self-deprecation.

There’s a hint of madness about the 24-hour version, though, which has necessitated some safety modifications over the years. Once, teams finished at the offices of what used to be Birds Australia, in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. With teams driving around the clock and totals docked by one bird for every five minutes after the appointed time, it was a speed and fatigue-fuelled lawsuit waiting to happen.… Read more..

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All things dull and ugly

Australian Politics, Environment, Qld Politics / / 3 minutes of reading

The headline on the Climate Spectator website said it all. “Approval of Adani’s mega coal mine overturned – for a skink and a snake, not a fried planet,” it read. The federal court’s decision, it went on, came down to “protecting two animals you’ve probably never heard of”: the Yakka Skink and the Ornamental Snake.

The trade minister, Andrew Robb, apparently suffering from reptile rage, described the skink as a “patsy”, implying that opposition to the mine was based on a hatred for coal more than concern for a lizard that is rarely seen even by herpetologists. (The best way to find one is to look for the little piles of poop outside their burrows.)

Not since former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett called the Orange-bellied Parrot a “trumped-up corella”, when its critically endangered status proved problematic to the planned relocation of a chemical plant, have we seen such disdain heaped upon a critter for getting in the way of development.

Kennett’s attitude to the parrot – which has a wild population of about 35 – summed up the general care factor towards any animal that’s smaller than a whale and not as cute as a koala. Species such as the Leadbeater’s Possum and Tasmanian Devil have benefitted from broad public recognition.… Read more..

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The feral menace and asylum seekers. No, really.

Environment / / 4 minutes of reading

The story of the Stephens Island Wren is one of the more predictable parables in the annals of extinction. The wren was a tiny flightless songbird that lived on an island measuring just 150 hectares in New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds, and it was doomed from the moment it was proposed that a lighthouse be erected there in the late 19th century.

The lighthouse was operational by early 1894. The wren was discovered a few months later, in the jaws of the lighthouse keeper’s cat Tibbles; the species was lost forever by the winter of 1895. As the Christchurch newspaper The Press editorialised at the time, “This is probably a record performance in the way of extermination.”

For years, poor Tibbles was held responsible for nibbling his way through the island’s entire population of wrens. In fact, the island was heaving with feral cats after the accidental escape of a pregnant female in early 1894. It took another three years for them to also kill off the Stephens Island Piopio, a type of thrush.

I’m not sure which scientific or historical literature Adrian Franklin reviewed in his defence of the feral cat – he doesn’t say. Franklin claims detestation of introduced animals is linked to our national paranoia about, wait for it, asylum seekers.… Read more..

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Not pretty enough: an extinction under our nose

Environment / / 7 minutes of reading

“Why do you see, why do you see, why do you see right through me?” – Kasey Chambers

Recently, my partner and I took a walk up in the forests of Mt Mee, at the northern end of the D’Aguilar Range about an hour’s drive from Brisbane. We had a specific purpose: we were searching for the rare, threatened and exceptionally beautiful Richmond Birdwing. To our delight, we found a male quickly, not far from the car park of the Mill Rainforest Walk. I’d wanted to see one of these creatures for years, and it was truly an eye-popping pleasure (photo courtesy Tom Tarrant).

RBW

The birdwing is a very large butterfly, one of three in the genus Ornithoptera in Australia. The males of all three species found in this country (the other two are the Cairns and New Guinea Birdwings) are similar: the upperwings are a striking contrast of deep velvet black and emerald green; the abdomen is bright yellow, while the underwings are adorned with an intricate latticework of yellow, black and turquoise. They are the southernmost representatives of their type, originally occurring from around Maryborough in south-east Queensland down to the Clarence River in northern New South Wales. Apparently they were abundant in Brisbane in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.… Read more..

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