Southwest Western Australia’s flowering, feathered and furry members of the first two categories need each other, vitally.
Could their survival prospects have anything to do with the third category?
Comments closedCategory: Western Australia
Our planet has just two white-tailed black cockatoo species.
Both are endangered, and their only “home” is in southwest Western Australia.
My beloved and I live within a very few minutes flying time of the centre of this region’s one metropolis.
For some months of every year, we see and hear one of those two species almost every day – on most days, more than once.
All photos were taken in Blencowe St, West Leederville
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All photos copyright Doug Spencer, taken on recent walks on local streets and footpaths.
The lovely, spacious musical bonus comes from the northern hemisphere…
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Most mallee species are eucalypts, and more than half of Eucalyptus species are mallees.
Their generally modest height and oft-“untidy”/“shaggy” appearance blind some people to mallees’ beauty, their great diversity, and their oft-astonishing buds and flowers.
As with so many Australian species, the closer you look, the more spectacular, surprising and glorious they are.
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..is by no means uncommon in Perth, but this one delivered something amazing.
The photo above shows Lake Monger Reserve’s southernmost section – its faux “European” part – where exotic trees and lawn predominate, still.
The image below looks to the lake’s longer, eastern shore, where an ongoing rehabilitation process has re-established more appropriate riparian vegetation.
There, “local” plants now predominate. They – along with other measures to reduce eutrophication – are key to Lake Monger’s recently-improving health, after circa 170 years of seemingly-irreversible, human-induced decline.
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The Australasian Darter – Anhinga novaehollandiae – is our single member of the Anhinga genus, which has just four species.
All of its members are commonly known as “snake birds”.
You could consider their “snake” as a spearhead, with a brain-powered, spring-loaded, feathered shaft.
The shaft’s spring-loading is via their neck’s unique hinge mechanism, at the 8th & 9th vertebrae.
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This post, the two recent Boab posts, and two future posts are all fruits of the afternoon of the same day – 20.05.21.
Southwestern Australia’s Spring flowering is indeed one of the world’s most astonishing and beautiful natural phenomena, and Kings Park in Spring is guaranteed to leave any Northern Hemisphere resident’s jaws agape.
It is, however, a BIG mistake to pay attention in Spring, only.
In southwest WA generally, and Kings Park specifically, you can easily see some extraordinary endemic species, in full bloom, at any time; Kings Park’s Banksia Garden never disappoints.
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(four times, if you are new to Bob Dylan’s not-altogether-original “original”)
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
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The featured image is surprising enough – young boabs thriving, on the rim of Kings Park’s Mt Eliza, overlooking South Perth – a place with an utterly “wrong” climate.
Just a few metres away – and altogether more amazing – is Kings Park’s more recently-arrived but very much older boab.
If Guinness had a “longest road trip ever undertaken by a large, living tree” category (to qualify, the tree must be alive, still, a decade after its relocation) the tree pictured below would surely hold that record.
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Not all deciduous trees have home addresses in cool temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
This one’s home is in a very particular part of tropical Australia.
This individual is circa 750 years old, weighs 36 tonnes, and is thriving in a place with quite the “wrong” climate, 3200 kilometres from home.
Even more amazingly, to get “here” it survived uprooting, followed by almost certainly the longest road trip ever undertaken by a large, living tree.
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