As part of our ‘Delving Deeper into Greens Bush’ series of educational walk & talks, Greens Bush Association (GBA) recently carried out a guided walk in Greens Bush (GB) with our Parks Victoria (PV) ranger, Kim Cott. & GBA organisers, Virginia Carter & Mark Mooney. The aim of the walk was to showcase & discuss the extent & overall strategy of restoration works occurring throughout GB. A map highlighting all works was displayed & discussed at different points of the walk…
Thanks to technological advances, citizen science has evolved into a major force in observing and understanding our environment. Familiar examples include Birds in Backyards, the FrogID, and Snap Send Solve (for dead or injured animals). What is not widely realised is that many of these data are automatically uploaded to a central repository called Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). A repository that now contains over 130 million records of flora and fauna in Australia (indigenous and exotic) and…
International travel brings into sharp focus the multicultural world of humankind. To visit Delhi from Melbourne is to dive into a strange new world of speech, mannerisms, lifestyles, food, and even scents. Move on to Newcastle (UK) and you soon conclude that the indecipherable Geordie accent should be reclassified as a foreign language. Take an Australian magpie from Main Creek to Sydney and it will wonder about those strange black backs and look on with bemusement as the locals attack…
Shire Councillors at their 8 August meeting voted to write to the State Government to demand that the Peninsula be removed from the state commercial kangaroo harvesting program. As reported in the Southern Peninsula News, the purpose of the letter is "to further inform the state government of the urgent need to protect the viability of kangaroos on the peninsula". Why is this good news? Kangaroo numbers: A detailed survey conducted for the Shire over a decade ago…
Genetic analysis reported by Australian scientists in Science Advances has found that dingoes occupy their own niche between wolves and domestic dogs. Their long residency in Australia has allowed their genes to evolve to better adapt them to our unique environments. They are now a critical peak predator in the Australian landscape, indeed one of the few such predators left. Yet, as Dr. Kyle Cairns from UNSW commented, they are: “the only native animal that is baited and killed across…
Forget about all the ballyhoo on celestial events like eclipses, meteorite showers, or the passage of comets. Get tickets to a natural event in the US Midwest and Southeast this May-July - an event that only occurs every on one in 221 years. Periodical Cicadas (Magicicada), appearon stable, multi-year cycles. After hatching, the grubs drop from the bark where mum has laid them and burrow into the soil, where they remain for many years feeding off tree roots. At the allotted time they…
Following on from previous newsletter articles on the growing evidence that species other than us are sentient comes a review of a book that presents evidence that bees are very-much sentient. In particular, bees appear to display the following sentient qualities: sophisticated emotions resembling optimism, frustration, playfulness and fear; experiencing PTSD-like symptoms; recognizing different human faces; processing long-term memories while sleeping; and maybe even dreaming. Cartoon from here..
