At the moment southwestern Australia’s very own turtle is very evident at Lake Monger.
All photos copyright Doug Spencer, taken late afternoon on 27 January 2021.
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The featured bird is very tiny, very hardy.
“His” valley’s sparsely vegetated floor – the “low ground”, locally – all sits within 200 metres either side of 4000 metres above sea level.
If transplanted to the Tibetan Plateau, New Zealand’s highest peak would fail to reach this valley’s lowest point.
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Meet Ochotona gloveri – Glover’s pika.
This mostly-solitary herbivore is a high altitude specialist, to whom temperatures north of 26 Celsius could prove fatal.
Glover’s pikas live on and near to the Tibetan Plateau, mostly on/in steep rockfaces.
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Asia’s wild asses are different from Africa’s, and larger too.
All but one kind are generally reckoned subspecies of Equus hemionus, the Asiatic wild ass or onager.
Pictured above and below is the khur or Indian wild ass, Equus hemionus khur.
Once widespread, in large numbers, khur now only number several thousand individuals, most of them in the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, western India.
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Red Pandas are their genus’s only (two) species; further, they are the only living members of their family, Ailuridae.
They are only very distantly related to Giant Pandas.
Giant Pandas are bears, members of the Ursidae family.
Red Pandas are more closely related to weasels, skunks and raccoons, as fellow members of the superfamily, Musteloidea.
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The featured image depicts maternal tenderness, but Macaca thibetana is also a strikingly aggressive, opportunistic species.
Unsurprisingly, this species’ “near threatened” status is the result of pressure/competition from our own aggressive, opportunistic species!
Tibetan Macaques live in cool subtropical Asian forests at elevations between 800 and 2500 metres above sea level.
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Ugly Beauty is a composition by Thelonious Monk.
Received notions, prejudices and phobias can prevent people from seeing or hearing clearly.
Less so posthumously, but very much so during his lifetime, many just did not “get” Monk’s music – for reasons not hugely dissimilar to those which can blind people to an arachnid’s or a reptile’s beauty.
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The pictured individuals are within their “proper” range, in Rajasthan.
(see #26 in this “a shining moment” series for details about the very special, particular location)
However, for more than a few years, feral members of their species lived in several suburbs of Perth, Western Australia.
At least three individuals did 160 kilometres “better”, reaching the Wheatbelt town of Pingelly!
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No other large desert is so densely populated by humans.
Its remarkably abundant and diverse wildlife also defies preconceived notions of deserts as “empty” or “barren” places.
Most of the Thar Desert is in northwest India; the other 15% is in Pakistan.
The greater portion is in Rajasthan.
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Widely regarded as the loveliest deer, the chital has a connection to the cheetah; it is not a predator-prey connection…in the present, at least.
Axis axis was also, in 1803, the very first deer species to be introduced to Australia.
The chital is one of the island continent’s longest-established feral animals.
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