So this post may just be an excuse for me to post more photos from my trip to the Living Desert Zoo and Garden. While wolves and coyotes may look similar enough for the lay person like myself to confuse them, they have distinct evolutionary histories. It points to a question I have about what canine canids were doing after the collapse of the borphaginine canids and gives me another reason to use one of my favorite terms here at Studia Mirabilium: Autochthonous.
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I was sadden when I heard of the passing of Kahurangi, the only kokako in captivity. While she may be gone her species, and family really, have been making a steady comeback from the brink of extinction.
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I was thoroughly impressed with the Australia exhibit at the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, CA. It had an automated double-door system and staff to let you know the rules and keep eye on things. Once inside, you are treated to a walk-in aviary style exhibit that had free flight birds as well as free roaming wallabies. Bennett’s Wallaby (Notamacropus rufogriseus) are medium sized macropods found in Eastern Australia into Tasmania.
Again, I am intrigued by the whole Sharing the Planet thing. My own North American perspective skews what I think are urban animals. In many cities in the West, the commensal mammals that have found some success in novel urban habitats typically have been things like muridae (rats, mice, squirrels, etc) canidae (coyotes, foxes), procyonidae (raccoons), lagomorphs (rabbits) and cervidae (deer). Even North America’s lone marsupial (opossum) have carved out a niche in urban habitat.
The native mammal guild of Australia is far different from North America. Many of their unique mammals have not fared well against the onslaught of the expanding human footprint. Yet, as I look at these free roaming wallabies in albeit a controlled environment, I wonder at the possibility of an urban fauna looking far different from what my eyes are used to. While we shouldn’t use it as an excuse to bulldoze pristine habitat, let’s do what we can to ensure the peaceful coexistence of man and, in this case, wallaby.
Travel is one of those things with pretty distinct paradigm shifts to me. Once change happens, it’s hard to remember what it was like before the change. It took me 5 hours to fly 2,000 some odd miles. Yet it was a mere 100ish years ago that we travelled by hoof and sail. The same trip would have taken me weeks. Route 66 was one of the main ways to get to the west coast for the average person. “Road trips” weren’t really a thing before the automobile and Route 66 held many fond memories for a generation of Americans. Nowadays with efficient air travel, the romance of Route 66 has faded. It is just another overlooked sign by the side of a nondescript road.
The hills behind the Popeye’s might not mean much to most folks, but they too went through a paradigm shift. Ground Sloths and Mammoths once roamed that very hillside. So bear with me if I smile at some random California landscape the same way your older uncle may look fondly at a road sign on a dead palm stump.
One of our volunteers, Alex, came across this female Banza katydid today. I don’t have the eye for it, last time I saw one was years back when I last posted about our native katydids. I had forgotten how large they are, the Drosophila and Philodoria I recently posted about are much smaller than this. Seeing one in a large Clermontia kakeana was a nice treat.
I had family in town and took them to a short hike with expansive views over Kahana Bay. While very popular with out of town guests, I was pleasantly surprised to come across some native plants persisting at low elevation amongst the invasive scrub. Let’s take a look at these survivors on the windward coast.
Continue readingRight off the bat I’d just like to say the world is a better place with rhinos in it. Rhinos for me are also interesting because they are vestiges of a bygone era; when I look at one, I can’t help but to be transported back in time.
Baby rhinos are super cute but they are also a decent stand in for a different type of rhinoceros. While we think of modern rhinos as horned creatures, a whole assortment evolved long ago without horns. From the giant indricotheres to aceratherium, a number of lineages lack this trait so characteristic of modern rhinos that they take their name after it.
Rhinoceratids and Perissodactyls in general were quite successful back in the Eocene, some 40 million years ago. When I see our baby rhino, `Akamu, running around; I picture those lush Eocene forests with hornless rhinos of various sizes and body shapes. It was a world where the largest meat-eaters were not animals like wolves, lion, bears & hyenas, but a strange assemblage of hyeanadonts, amphicyonids, terrestrial birds, and crocodyliformes. There were also holdovers from the Mesozoic like multituberculates that coexisted with these hornless rhinos. All now extinct, Rhinos remain but without care, they may join these strange and wonderful animals in extinction. We are lucky that we still can do something about that for these echos of the Eocene.
`Akamu can be seen in the Savannah section of the Honolulu Zoo, stop by and check out these amazing animals.
What if I told you that an endangered Hawaiian bird can be easily seen from a station of the new rail system? One doesn’t usually associate rare fauna with urban areas, but that is exactly the case by the Kalauao station of the Honolulu Skyline; it’s right in front of Pearl Ridge Mall. And what seems like an odd occurrence now may be a guidepost to a healthier ecological future.
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*From Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai’i
Lagerstatten present an interesting, if morbid, paradox. The very processes which leads to exquisite fossil preservation for appreciation and study, while quite fortuitous from our point of view, are also horrible, no good, very bad ones for the object of our inquiry. Think extreme landslide or flood or eruption. Things that we ourselves would not want to be caught in the middle of. Still, these catastrophic events can sometimes provide an unparalleled view of the past. One of the finest examples of this in the world happens to be on a small hillside 3 hours outside Omaha, Nebraska. A few days ago I was lucky enough to finally visit the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Antelope County, NE.
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