I picked up this meme from Tortoise Trails. It's supposed to be the first sentence of the first post of each month in 2006 but, as I only started blogging in June, I've expanded it to cover the first para.
I collect she oaks (Casuarinaceae). This is a recent obsession and I don't have very many species ... so far. Three species of Casuarina and nine of Allocasuarina sit in pots outside my back door. Only another 80-something more if I want to collect the set. (I don't know what happens then. Maybe I get a free set of steak knives.) More ...
Pulau Kapas in the South China Sea is full of water monitors (Varanus salvator), which scavenge around the bins and pick off the odd rat. It's also absolutely chockers with snails. The trunks and branches of rainforest trees are covered in Amphidromus inversus, a large plain-coloured species of camaenid. It's a bit of an eye opener for Australian snail hunters. Over on this side of the Java Sea, finding native snails takes a major effort. More ...
Littoraria is a genus of snails living in mangrove forests around the tropical Indo-Pacific. If you're searching for them (and they're worth the hunt), look up rather than down. Unlike many other mangrove molluscs, species of Littoraria spend most of their time among foliage. Mud is not their thing. More ...
Today is the 92nd anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). Once found in such mind-bogglingly large numbers across the eastern United States that they were shot to make agricultural fertilizer, the species became extinct in the wild in 1900. Martha became an ex-pigeon fourteen years later, dropping off the perch at Cincinnati Zoo at the age of 29—the end of a long and lonely life. More ...
The Cape Arid climber, Kennedia beckxiana, has just started to flower. It is restricted to a small area of coastal Western Australia from Condingup to Israelite Bay, where it grows on granite and sand. Despite the need for free-draining soil, it's another Kennedia that does well on the Melbourne clay. More ...
National Novel Writing Month starts today. Just thought I'd mention it. More ...
An unscheduled moment in the Walkley Award ceremony tonight. The Sunday Telegraph's Glenn Milne got up on stage as unsteady as a newt and assaulted Stephen Mayne, who was presenting the Walkley award for the best photographic essay or business something or other. (I wasn't paying that much attention.) More ...
