Roadkill will come in handy when next you run into a Black Kite as it lifts, engorged with rotting flesh and on struggling wings, off a carcass on the roadside - or when you run into a wombat, a snake, a horse...you get the drift.
It is a little too early to tell what the mid-term effects of the collapse of these schemes will have on the viability of what is a valuable and useful agricultural enterprise but it remains to be seen how many of the trees that have been planted will ever be harvested - or just be left to rot in the ground.
The Crested Bellbird has a very distinctive call, from which its Warlpiri name of Kanpanparlala is an onomatopoeic derivation.
The Turkey Vulture is a common bird in the south of the United States and has a range from southern Canada to the tip of the southern American continent.
In Australia we have 14 families and over 2,800 species of crickets and grasshoppers - here are some pictures and stories of grasshoppers found in central Australia.
The Owlet-nightjar, known to the Warlpiri people as Jarlajirrpi, is commonly regarded as a familiar spirit of the Kurdaitcha man - part mercenary contract killer, part quasi-judicial executioner.
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.
"...a poor dried up land afflicted by fever and flies and fit only for a college of monks whose religious zeal might cope with the suffocating heat and musketos which admitted no moment of repose." Matthew Flinders describing northern Australia
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.
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.
