These market stalls contain "an assembly of skulls and skins arranged in a powerful, if often rather disturbing, display that can include horse and hyena heads, crocodiles, dried snakes and monkey skulls. The presence of so much decomposing flesh, crudely preserved with only ash or salt, makes for a very unhealthy background odour and a super-abundance of flies.
Australia is an ornithological terra nullius - an ‘empty land' - It is unforgivable that the most complete references to Australian Aboriginal ornithology are found in John Gould's Handbook to the Birds of Australia, 1865 - published 138 years ago.
I first saw the Wedge-tails free-flying at the Alice Springs Desert Park years ago and have been aware of the often violent interactions between the two captive birds and a pair of wild local Wedge-tails. Now the captive birds have been released.
For too long, western scientists have either willfully ignored indigenous knowledge of Australia's birds or damned it as ‘unscientific'. How we access and record what people know of and how they use birds, and the value of indigenous bird knowledge are important tools for species and landscape management.
Kala tiya-tiya ngulaji kalu-jana ngarrirni yapa yangka Jardiwanpaku wiri kujakarla nyinami yapa, ngularlangu tiya-tiyaji yapa wiri. Kula jurlpu-mipa yirdiji tiya-tiyaji, kala yangka yapa wiri jujuku-ngarduyu.
Collared Sparrowhawk Accipiter cirrhocephalus This glorious—though somewhat glum-looking—Collared Sparrowhawk, Accipiter cirrhocephalus, has been hanging around my back yard over the past few weeks – most likely lured in by the Zebra Finches, small Honeyeaters and other birds that crowd in for the water in the backyard. Here he, and I’m pretty sure it is a [...]
The drive that gripped Alan that stormy night in the Himalayas can carry us into all sorts of situations. Most of the time the stories engendered add to the great canon of harmless eccentricities. But in some instances the birder's drive can lead to dreadful tragedy.
Scores of Buddhist villagers in India's north-eastern state of Assam have performed a unique funeral ritual for more than 800 endangered storks that died after a tree where they were nesting fell ... The villagers, most of them farmers, considered the banyan tree sacred and believed that the storks were their guardian angels.
