During the hot, dry summer months, Alice Springs is often beset by a beautiful plague – flocks of thousands of green budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) in search of increasingly scarce sources of water. Photographer Steven Pearce says that there was around 4000 birds congregating around the waterhole just after dawn.
Straddling the equator, born of fire and shaped by the confluence of three ocean currents, the Galápagos archipelago has a unique place in the natural world. Here are our six favourite birds that call the Galápagos archipelago home.
Rather than merely climb, some ingenious possums have taken to the air to swoop between the trees of Australian forests.
Golden bowerbirds are known for their faithfulness: often the bowers constructed by these birds remain the same for up to 30 years. But when these intricately constructed twig formations start disappearing, scientists can tell something might be wrong.
By combining data on the cat population, hunting rates and spatial distribution, these scientists have calculated that these invasive predators kill 377 million birds a year.
The boulder-strewn open woodlands of central Victoria are sometimes referred to as the “robinfields”. It’s probably the only area where you can hope to see, in the one place, nine of the 20 species in the Australian robin family.
The pair of Tassie devils are a part of a much larger effort to save their species from extinction.
The massive network of rocky reefs that lines much of southern Australia’s coastline is a shadowy cold-water underworld dominated by brown seaweeds known as kelp. The Great Southern Reef might not be as visually flamboyant as Australia’s world-famous Great Barrier Reef, with its colourful hard corals and sunlit shallow waters, but its communities of creatures are unlike anything else worldwide.
The fastest insect on Earth, according to the Guinness World Records, is an Australian dragonfly.
Anne Hayes has completed several assignments on botanical themes for Australian Geographic. And like any AG commission, each one has been founded on accuracy attained through detailed and thorough research and observation. This is a selection of Anne’s work.