Echidnas

Monotreme is an order of mammals that are so odd, they originally confounded scientists and were at first thought to be hoaxes. Monotremes are egg-laying mammals, but that is not the only odd thing about them.
The monotreme with which most people are familiar is the platypus, that delightfully wacky composite of duck and otter, with [...]

Tree Ferns

After a few days in the city, I had the pleasure of heading into the nearby mountains—the Dandenongs. I was delighted to find myself surrounded by greenery. It is a lovely feature of Australia’s largest city’s that there are mountains and wilder, or at least more rural, areas quite close at hand, where one can [...]

Admiral’s Arch

The Remarkable Rocks are not, in fact, the only remarkable rocks on Kangaroo Island. The island as a whole is a patchwork of ancient and noteworthy features. In fact, some of the exposed rocks and outcrops are of such geological significance, they have been designated as “geological monuments.” Of the 27 designated geological monuments on [...]

Paterson’s Curse

As I traveled into the countryside outside of Adelaide, I was amazed to see fields everywhere blanketed by lovely, tall, purple-flowered plants that were identified as weeds called Paterson’s Curse (Echium plantagineum). Also known as Salvation Jane, this relative of borage, introduced from Europe in the mid-1800s, has become widespread in temperate Australia. It blankets [...]

Cockatoos

Australia is sometimes called the Land of the Parrot, and wherever I went, from the tropics to the deserts to chilly mountaintops, I could always find (and was always delighted by) at least a few species. I’ve already written of the stunning crimson rosellas and nearly ubiquitous galahs in earlier posts, but there are vastly [...]

Albany Coast, Torndirrup Peninsula

In many places, the face that this corner of Western Australia presents to the sea is a hard one—great walls of ancient granite and even older gneisses.
The oldest rocks, the gneisses, pre-date almost all life on Earth. Scientists estimate that these rocks were formed between 1300 and 1600 million years ago, shaped by incredibly [...]

What’s in a Name

The names of plants, both scientific and popular, always convey information, but not consistent information. Some names tell us who discovered a plant. Some are based on words used by earlier or indigenous people to identify the plant. Other names offer descriptions—what the plant looks like, who or what eats or interacts with it, what [...]

Joseph Banks and Banksia

I had read about Banksias, seen pictures of tiny marsupials lapping nectar from Banksias, but it was on the wildflower tour that I first came in contact with this odd, fascinating, iconic Aussie flower in the wild. There are 76 species of Banksia, all but one of which are indigenous to Australia—and most of those [...]

Spinifex Pigeons

Despite the fact that much of the Pilbara is dry to the point of crispness, there is a surprising amount of flora and fauna, particularly close to places, such as the gorges, where water is available much of the year. Wildflowers, eucalypts, acacias, and spinifex dot the landscape and offer homes to birds, bugs, lizards, [...]

Hamersley Gorge

If you know anything about plate tectonics, you know that the surface of the planet is not static. It is, rather, in constant, if slow, motion, with continents moving, seas opening and closing—and earthquakes and volcanoes along the edges where the plates meet. Over the ages, land has been repositioned, created, destroyed, pushed under, and [...]