Tag Archives: australia

Australia’s “Turkey”

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Today, here in the U.S., an annual tradition is underway; Thanksgiving. I sincerely hope that those of you that celebrate this festivity are hanging out with friends, family, or anyone that you care about, smartly swaddled in your best harvest sweaters. I hope by now, your unapologetically racist uncle has ceased his impassioned musings on how “all lives matter” and his declarations on how Donald Trump is “just the man for the job.” Don’t worry, the nausea will pass. I hope you’ve survived yet another round of invasive questions from perennially-seen Baby Boomer relatives about when you’ll be getting a “real” job, getting married, and having children. Take a deep breath, remember, murder is technically very much illegal. Besides, you can’t afford to go to prison. Not with all those student loans to pay off! Anyways, yeah, I wish everyone the best of luck out there.

Sure, most of us like to tell ourselves this holiday centers around ideals of family, generosity, and humbled self-reflection. But, let’s be real: the big draw for this autumnal grand event is the feast that comes along with it. Yes, modern Thanksgiving is a loving ode to gluttony…one I don’t resent for an instant. Pies, stuffing, rolls, gravy, pies, potatoes, squash….did I mention pies? But all of this pales in comparison to the main attraction, that poultry on a pedestal; the turkey.

Yes, turkey….more specifically, the domesticated form of Meleagris gallopavo, a large species of vaguely pheasant-like ground bird that ranges across much of the eastern two-thirds of the continental United States and south into northeastern Mexico. This species, along with a single close relative (the dazzlingly-colorful ocellated turkey, Meleagris ocellatus, from Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula) are the “true turkeys.” These two species make up the entirety of a distinct subfamily in the ground fowl family (Phasianidae), a large taxonomic grouping that includes chunky, chicken-like things that prefer to run rather than fly….everything from grouses to partridges to peacocks.
There are plenty of things in our world that share, completely or partially, the common name of the Meleagris birds. A venomous marine fish. Soy-based meat alternatives. West Asian countries. All these, of course, are Meleagris-style “turkeys” in name only. There are even a handful of other species of bird that are, confusingly, referred to as “turkeys” despite not being particularly close relatives of the gobble-gobble/hand tracing variety so familiar to North Americans.

One of these not-turkeys resides on the opposite side of the Pacific from Meleagris, and in the Southern Hemisphere. The animal I’m referring to is the Australian brush-turkey (Alectura lathami). With its beefy, bowling ball shape, alert and fanned out tail feathers, and naked head and neck…both saturated with colors that look like the end result of receiving a swirly in a vat of liquefied candy corn…the brush-turkey seems damn deserving of its fowl moniker.


Shit, it even wears a festive, yellow scarf. This thing is more ‘autumn’ than a fucking pumpkin spice latte.

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Eucalyptus regnans, Tallest Tree in the South

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I like really tall trees.

I suppose the possession of this adoration of our planet’s living, heaven-raking spires comes as a kind of birthright. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, an area not only richly coated with swaths of the densest temperate rainforests in the world, but also the tallest forests in the world. I came of age spending a great deal of time hiking and navigating forests largely consisting of several tree species that are among the world’s tallest. Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) are all found in the lush coastal forests of Oregon and far Northern California where I spent many long, summer days of my youth; each of them generally regarded as being within the top five tallest tree species on the planet, based on the consistency and frequency of superlatively monstrous individuals within each. Even the “smaller” trees in the region seem to reach uniformly towering heights. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) can top out at 200 feet (61 m) or more above the soft, spongy soil of the dark, coastal woods of Washington and Oregon. Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), a very common sight in the Pacific Coast Ranges, can easily grow to some 250 feet (76 m) at its droopy crown. The bottom levels of the canopy in a Pacific Northwestern old-growth rainforest can potentially be no less than 150 feet (46 m) high, which is a value not often matched in any other forested region on Earth.

A shaggier version of myself standing with the Quinault Lake Redcedar, the largest western redcedar in the world, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in June 2011 (Photo credit: Werner G. Buehler)

It’s no wonder that growing up immersed in this place has left me with a love for these great trees; old-growth forests full of venerable, enormous trees are incomparably majestic places. The sense of perspective and scale that these trees provide is invariably humbling. It’s difficult not to walk alongside them in a kind of hushed reverence, as if you were traversing the floor of an ancient and solemn temple or cathedral, one crafted from humongous, gnarled pillars of wood and moss, rounded with smoothed with deep time and dark silence. The temperate rainforest springs to life in intense bursts of emerald from wherever these trees have embedded their water-ravenous feet, with lithe lances of ferns and the ghostly baubles of root-associating mushrooms erupting wherever soil space is available. These dampest and darkest of woods, blanketed from the sun a football field’s length upwards, have been described as primordial, as a place of senescence and decay, but I think this is a misplaced conceptualization. The sites where the greatest of these trees grow is positively choked with life; life that clings to and parasitizes other life, life that reaches achingly skywards in even the weakest, most diluted sunbeam to touch down on the forest floor. In my mind, these are places of as much birth and flourishing as they are museums.

This aesthetically spell-binding quality, mixed with these forests’ complex ecology and somewhat unique, insular propensity to harbor endemic species…creatures found nowhere else in the world…is what persistently attracts me back to them time and time again (and also inspires me to write about them…multiple times…because I’m a little insufferable).

It is these types of places, misty, verdant groves of titanic conifers, that come to the mind of most when they envision the world’s tallest trees…granted they call the Northern Hemisphere home. It’s somewhat widely known that California’s coast redwoods are the world’s tallest species, and across the North American continent the sheer size of Pacific Northwest forest trees is no secret…especially when compared against the far more “compact” deciduous trees that are common on the Eastern Seaboard. But a very close contender for the title of the most gravity-taunting plant in the world comes from a location not often associated with impenetrable forests. One of the tallest organisms on Earth is an altogether different kind of plant than the behemoth redwoods, and it hails from the opposite side of the globe from the dewy haunts of Cascadia…a place far more associated with rust-colored, alien deserts, blinding heat, and a faunal assemblage that constitutes the world’s largest bucket of shorts-soiling “hell fucking no.”

I’m of course talking about Australia.

Yes, Australia is a place of extremes…where the venom flows like water, the coral reefs are supersized, and summer turns the landmass into a not-so-metaphoric broiling pan of unending solar-powered punishment  (one that keeps getting hotter). From a biological perspective, Australia is a continent perpetually locked in rebellious teenager mode, deviating from the rest of the world’s biota and letting its freak flag fly proudly for millions of years in a parade of pouches, flightless birds, weird plants, fangs, spikes, and scales. It is therefore quite fitting that one of the tallest trees in the world, the only one in the top five that is not a conifer, in pure contrarian style, is Australia’s Eucalyptus regnans…the “mountain ash” or “swamp gum.”

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Angry Birds, Part 2: Sinister Songbirds

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While it is relatively easy to think about massive, belligerent, hook-jawed, feathered monstrosities like the giant petrel, skua, and lammergeier as being kin to the long-extinct therapod dinosaurs, creatures solidly employed in the “flesh-rending-death-beast” profession, perhaps a little harder to grasp is the notion that commonplace little tweety birds have the capacity to be pint-size brutes. But there are certainly some shining star examples that I’ll outline here.

When I refer to “tweety birds”, I mean birds of the order Passeriformes, which are known as the “songbirds.” Robins, sparrows, meadowlarks, finches, orioles, crows, swallows, wrens….everything from Big Bird to Woodstock….Red Robin to the Arizona Cardinals…all of them are passeriform birds. They are members of by far the most diverse order of birds, and with more than 5,000 species, they are among the most speciose of any vertebrate order. They are distinguished from the other groups of birds by, generally speaking, their exquisite control of the syrinx (a vocal organ that is analogous to our own larynx) to generate elaborate bird songs. They are also notable for being a group of animals that has their evolutionary roots placed in a part of the world that is far more frequently noted for having endemic creatures that do not ever leave; Australia and New Guinea. It’s thought that these little guys first broke off from the rest of the flock roughly 50 to 60 million years ago in this arm of the old southern continent of Gondwana (which was isolated then just as it is today) and somehow exploded onto the world stage, rapidly diversifying and eventually finding themselves in all imaginable locations and habitats.

And it is in Australia that the first entry on this list makes its home.

Johnny Two-tone up there (the one who apparently shares an eye-color with Darth Maul) goes by the name of “Australian magpie” (Cracticus tibicen, if you’re nasty), and it’s easy to see why. The black-and-white ensemble (often referred to as a “pied” coloration) and wedge-shaped beak is dead ringer for the magpie bird that many people from the northern continents are familiar with. However, the two birds are not all that closely related, and the pigmentation pattern is a coincidence of convergent evolution. True magpies are in the crow and jay family (Corvidae) and while they are highly-intelligent and mischievous animals, they aren’t particularly aggressive birds, favoring wiley methods of scavenging and hanging around urban and suburban environments for human food waste. In contrast, the Australian “magpie” is a member of the Artamidae family, which is a group of crow-like birds native to the continent and surrounding islands, and the family is far more closely related to other Australasian, Southeast Asian, and Madagascan birds, like vangas and ioras, than they are to the corvids.

It’s also worth mentioning that the genus to which the Australian magpie belongs, Cracticus, is full of birds collectively known as “butcherbirds.”
So, you know we are off to a good start.

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Metatherians (Part 1 of 2): Extinct Megafauna

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Marsupials.

The immediate association most people have with the term ‘marsupial’ is that of fantastical, adorable, fluffy beasts in the far-away magical land of Oz, equipped with built-in fanny packs for storing their tiny, even more adorable, offspring. Bounding, big-eared kangaroos, sleepy koalas, and perhaps a hyperactive sugar glider or a waddling opossum might cross their minds. Not too far beyond this is where the train of thought pulls into its final stop, and suddenly they’re caught up in the romanticism of Australia itself; the sun-baked, tawny Outback scabland, didgeridoo droning in their mind’s ear, impossibly colorful fish flitting about the Great Barrier Reef, and perhaps Hugh Jackman or Nicole Kidman (whatever their fancy) driving cattle across the Northern Territory during The Dry.

While this idealization is all well and good, there is actually a lot more to these pouched animals than what fits on the in-fold of a Qantas brochure.
Marsupials are really bizarre by mammalian standards, and have a rich and relatively unrecognized evolutionary history that spans back 125 million years. This entry is one of two that will be devoted to these weird little creatures, focusing first on their unrealized illustrious past, and then on lesser known representatives of their clan in the present.

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Dragons

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Dragons.

We’ve known them as ancient, mythical, winged, pyromaniacal reptilian beasts with a flair for the dramatic and destructive. They have been a fixture in our lore, in some form or another, the world over. While most of these tales of dragons are fictional, or at least highly embellished, there is still a very strong chord of truth in them. The blaze-setting, screeching hell-drakes so common in storybooks have not existed for a very long time, and it is unlikely that Medieval humans actually had contact with them (this stands in contrast with unicorns, which went extinct in 1982 when the last specimen escaped from her enclosure and ingested some antifreeze). However, dragons have had a rich and colorful evolutionary history that dates back 225 million years, and their unique biology and rise and fall in biodiversity is worth discussing.

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