Nice Animals That Are Extinct photos

A few nice animals that are extinct images I found:

seminolecanyon064

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

seminolecanyon131

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

seminolecanyon043

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

Nice Animals That Are Extinct photos

Some cool animals that are extinct images:

seminolecanyon035

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

Desolate Sonoran Desert in Seminole Canyon State Park - seminolecanyon047

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

seminolecanyon089

Image by mlhradio
Seminole Canyon State Park, Val Verde County, Texas. One of the more remote state parks, tucked into the southwest corner of Texas about an hour's drive west of Del Rio.

This area has been inhabited since the very earliest days that humans set foot in North America, going back nearly 12,000 years - back during the last Ice Age when the land was more verdant with now-extinct animals still roaming the surrounding prairies and forest. But over the millenia, the climate changed to its current, arid desert landscape - and the Indians adapted.

All through these years, the local Indians drew pictograms all over the surrounding canyon walls and caves. In the dry climate, protected by overhanging rock walls, many of these pictograms survived through the ages. Some of the more famous sites, such as the Fate Bell and Panther Cave, are the feature attractions of Seminole Canyon, and can be visited by guided tour through the park.

However, I have not yet visited these sites - instead focusing on other areas of the park. On the first visit (March 9th, 2008), I arrived after the park had closed for the day. I walked along the short 'Windmill Trail', a small loop near the visitor's center. This trail leads down to a small year-round spring and the ruins of a water catchment system that was used by local settlers over the past hundred years.

The return trip (September 27, 2008) was much more fruitful - I chose to hike the Rio Grande River Trail, a six-mile out-and-back loop that leads to the far corner of the park, almost a stone's throw from Old Mexico. With recent rains it was fairly lively and green, with countless butterflies passing through on their annual migration. The trail starts alongside the original 'Loop Trail', the 1882 railroad alignment that was abandoned a decade later when a less strenuous route was forged and the Pecos River High Bridge was built.

The trail itself is pretty boring - a flat, featureless hike across a nondescript desert plain. But the main highlight of the hike quickly comes into view. There is a mile-long spur shooting off to the left called the Pressa Trail, which leads to an overlook looking down at a three-way intersection in the Seminole Canyon below. Here, the waters from Lake Amistad many miles away along the Rio Grande peter out; to the right, the waters are wide and deep, muddied from the recent rainstorms. To the left, the two forks of Seminole Canyon are mostly dry. From the top of the overlook, sheer cliffs lead staight down over a hundred feet to the waters below. The view is, well, *breathtaking* - and worth the trip.

Back on the main trail, a few miles later it comes to an abrupt end at the junction where Seminole Canyon merges with the Rio Grande. The location overlooks the Panther Cave pictograms, on the opposite shore far below, accessible only by boat. To the right, a few hundred yards away, are the hills of Mexico. Here, the water is deeper, the canyons steeper, the chasm wider. An impressive view, although not as amazing as the Pressa Trail overlook.

From here, it is a straight hike back along the south portion of the loop, my only companion a great horned toad trying to hide in the gravel of the trail. I would like to return to this park to take the guided tours, and there are other tours available nearby on private land to other pictogram sites as well. And I am told this park is also fabulous for bird watchers as well.

running 3

Check out these animals that are extinct images:

running 3

Image by kcolwell
The Wilds nurtures twenty-four species of animals that are endangered, threatened, or extinct in their native habitats

running 2

Image by kcolwell
The Wilds nurtures twenty-four species of animals that are endangered, threatened, or extinct in their native habitats

Shark Reef Aquarium, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada (3)

Check out these animals that are extinct images:

Shark Reef Aquarium, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada (3)

Image by Ken Lund
Komodo dragon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Komodo dragon[1]


Conservation status

Vulnerable (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Class: Reptilia

Order: Squamata

Suborder: Scleroglossa

Family: Varanidae

Genus: Varanus

Species: V. komodoensis


Binomial name
Varanus komodoensis
Ouwens, 1912[2]


Komodo dragon distribution
The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is a venomous species of lizard that inhabits the islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang in Indonesia.[3] A member of the monitor lizard family (Varanidae), it is the largest living species of lizard, growing to an average length of 2 to 3 metres (6.6 to 9.8 ft) and weighing around 70 kilograms (150 lb). Their unusual size is attributed to island gigantism, since there are no other carnivorous animals to fill the niche on the islands where they live, and also to the Komodo dragon's low metabolic rate.[4][5] As a result of their size, these lizards dominate the ecosystems in which they live.[6] Although Komodo dragons eat mostly carrion, they will also hunt and ambush prey including invertebrates, birds, and mammals.

Mating begins between May and August, and the eggs are laid in September. About twenty eggs are deposited in abandoned megapode nests and incubated for seven to eight months, hatching in April, when insects are most plentiful. Young Komodo dragons are vulnerable and therefore dwell in trees, safe from predators and cannibalistic adults. They take around three to five years to mature, and may live as long as fifty years. They are among the rare vertebrates capable of parthenogenesis, in which females may lay viable eggs if males are absent.[7]

Komodo dragons were discovered by Western scientists in 1910. Their large size and fearsome reputation make them popular zoo exhibits. In the wild their range has contracted due to human activities and they are listed as vulnerable by the IUCN. They are protected under Indonesian law, and a national park, Komodo National Park, was founded to aid protection efforts.

Contents [hide]
1 Etymology
2 Evolutionary history
3 Description
3.1 Senses
4 Ecology
4.1 Diet
4.2 Venom
4.3 Reproduction
4.4 Parthenogenesis
5 History
5.1 Discovery by the Western world
5.2 Studies
6 Danger to humans
7 Conservation
7.1 In captivity
8 See also
9 References
10 Further reading



[edit] Etymology
The Komodo dragon is also known as the Komodo monitor or the Komodo Island monitor in scientific literature, although this is not very common.[1] To the natives of Komodo Island, it is referred to as ora, buaya darat (land crocodile) or biawak raksasa (giant monitor).[8][9]


[edit] Evolutionary history
The evolutionary development of the Komodo dragon started with the Varanus genus, which originated in Asia about 40 million years ago and migrated to Australia. Around 15 million years ago, a collision between Australia and Southeast Asia allowed the varanids to move into what is now the Indonesian archipelago. The Komodo dragon is believed to have differentiated from its Australian ancestors 4 million years ago, extending their range to as far east as the island of Timor. Dramatic lowering of sea level during the last glacial period uncovered extensive stretches of continental shelf that the Komodo dragon colonized, becoming isolated in their present island range as sea levels rose afterwards.[9]


[edit] Description

Closeup of a Komodo dragon's skinIn the wild, an adult Komodo dragon usually weighs around 70 kilograms (150 lb),[10] although captive specimens often weigh more. The largest verified wild specimen was 3.13 metres (10.3 ft) long and weighed 166 kilograms (370 lb), including undigested food.[9] The Komodo dragon has a tail as long as its body, as well as about 60 frequently replaced serrated teeth that can measure up to 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) in length. Its saliva is frequently blood-tinged, because its teeth are almost completely covered by gingival tissue that is naturally lacerated during feeding.[11] This creates an ideal culture for the virulent bacteria that live in its mouth.[12] It also has a long, yellow, deeply forked tongue.[9]


[edit] Senses
The Komodo dragon does not have a particularly acute sense of hearing, despite its visible earholes, and is only able to hear sounds between 400 and 2000 hertz.[9][13] It is able to see as far away as 300 metres (980 ft), but because its retinas only contain cones, it is thought to have poor night vision. The Komodo dragon is able to see in color, but has poor visual discrimination of stationary objects.[14]



A Komodo dragon on Komodo Island uses his tongue to sample the air.The Komodo dragon uses its tongue to detect, taste, and smell stimuli, as with many other reptiles, with the vomeronasal sense using a Jacobson's organ, a sense that aids navigation in the dark.[12] With the help of a favorable wind and its habit of swinging its head from side to side as it walks, Komodo dragons may be able to detect carrion from 4–9.5 kilometres (2.5–6 mi) away.[11][14] The dragon's nostrils are not of great use for smelling, as the animal does not have a diaphragm.[11][15] It only has a few taste buds in the back of its throat.[12] Its scales, some of which are reinforced with bone, have sensory plaques connected to nerves that facilitate its sense of touch. The scales around the ears, lips, chin, and soles of the feet may have three or more sensory plaques.[11]

The Komodo dragon was formerly thought to be deaf when a study reported no agitation in wild Komodo dragons in response to whispers, raised voices, or shouts. This was disputed when London Zoological Garden employee Joan Proctor trained a captive specimen to come out to feed at the sound of her voice, even when she could not be seen.[16]


[edit] Ecology

Close-up of a Komodo dragon's foot and tailThe Komodo dragon prefers hot and dry places, and typically lives in dry open grassland, savanna, and tropical forest at low elevations. As an ectotherm, it is most active in the day, although it exhibits some nocturnal activity. Komodo dragons are largely solitary, coming together only to breed and eat. They are capable of running rapidly in brief sprints up to 20 kilometres per hour (12.4 mph), diving up to 4.5 metres (15 ft), and climbing trees proficiently when young through use of their strong claws.[10] To catch prey that is out of reach, the Komodo dragon may stand on its hind legs and use its tail as a support.[16] As the Komodo dragon matures, its claws are used primarily as weapons, as its great size makes climbing impractical.[11]

For shelter, the Komodo dragon digs holes that can measure from 1–3 metres (3–10 ft) wide with its powerful forelimbs and claws.[17] Because of its large size and habit of sleeping in these burrows, it is able to conserve body heat throughout the night and minimize its basking period the morning after.[18] The Komodo dragon typically hunts in the afternoon, but stays in the shade during the hottest part of the day.[19] These special resting places, usually located on ridges with a cool sea breeze, are marked with droppings and are cleared of vegetation. They also serve as a strategic location from which to ambush deer.[20]


[edit] Diet

Komodo dragons on RincaKomodo dragons are carnivores. Although they eat mostly carrion,[4] they will also ambush live prey with a stealthy approach, a technique that has allowed the Komodo dragon to capture even the most lethal prey, such as the King Cobra. When suitable prey arrives near a dragon's ambush site, it will suddenly charge at the animal and go for the underside or the throat.[11] It is able to locate its prey using its keen sense of smell, which can locate a dead or dying animal from a range of up to 9.5 kilometers (6 miles).[11] Komodo dragons have also been observed knocking down large pigs and deer with their strong tail.[21]

Komodo dragons eat by tearing large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole while holding the carcass down with their forelegs. For smaller prey up to the size of a goat, their loosely articulated jaws, flexible skull, and expandable stomach allow it to swallow its prey whole. The vegetable contents of the stomach and intestines are typically avoided.[20][clarification needed] Copious amounts of red saliva that the Komodo dragons produce help to lubricate the food, but swallowing is still a long process (15–20 minutes to swallow a goat). Komodo dragons may attempt to speed up the process by ramming the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat, sometimes ramming so forcefully that the tree is knocked down.[20] To prevent itself from suffocating while swallowing, it breathes using a small tube under the tongue that connects to the lungs.[11] After eating up to 80 percent of its body weight in one meal,[6] it drags itself to a sunny location to speed digestion, as the food could rot and poison the dragon if left undigested for too long. Because of their slow metabolism, large dragons can survive on as little as 12 meals a year.[11] After digestion, the Komodo dragon regurgitates a mass of horns, hair, and teeth known as the gastric pellet, which is covered in malodorous mucus. After regurgitating the gastric pellet, it rubs its face in the dirt or on bushes to get rid of the mucus, suggesting that it, like humans, does not relish the scent of its own excretions.[11]


A young Komodo dragon photographed on Rinca feeding on a water buffalo carcassThe largest animals generally eat first, while the smaller ones follow a hierarchy. The largest male asserts his dominance and the smaller males show their submission by use of body language and rumbling hisses. Dragons of equal size may resort to "wrestling." Losers usually retreat though they have been known to be killed and eaten by victors.[11]

The Komodo dragon's diet is wide-ranging, and includes invertebrates, other reptiles (including smaller Komodo dragons), birds, bird eggs, small mammals, monkeys, wild boar, goats, deer, horses, and water buffalo.[22] Young Komodos will eat insects, eggs, geckos, and small mammals.[4] Occasionally they consume humans and human corpses, digging up bodies from shallow graves.[16] This habit of raiding graves caused the villagers of Komodo to move their graves from sandy to clay ground and pile rocks on top of them to deter the lizards.[20] The Komodo dragon may have evolved to feed on the extinct dwarf elephant Stegodon that once lived on Flores, according to evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond.[23] The Komodo dragon has also been observed intentionally startling a pregnant deer in the hopes of a miscarriage whose remains they can eat, a technique that has also been observed in large African predators.[23]

Because the Komodo dragon does not have a diaphragm, it cannot suck water when drinking, nor can it lap water with its tongue. Instead, it drinks by taking a mouthful of water, lifting its head, and letting the water run down its throat.[11]


[edit] Venom

A sleeping Komodo dragon. Its large, curved claws are used in fighting and eating.Auffenberg described the Komodo dragon as having septic pathogens in its saliva, specifically the bacteria: Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus sp., Providencia sp., Proteus morgani and P. mirabilis.[24] He noted that while these pathogens can be found in the mouths of wild Komodo dragons, they disappear from the mouths of captive animals, due to a cleaner diet.[24][25] This was verified by taking mucous samples from the external gum surface of the upper jaw of two freshly captured individuals.[24][25] Saliva samples were analyzed by researchers at the University of Texas who found 57 different strains of bacteria growing in the mouths of three wild Komodo dragons including Pasteurella multocida.[9][26] The rapid growth of this bacteria was noted by Friedking: "Normally it takes about three days for a sample of P. multocida to cover a petri dish,Ours took eight hours. We were very taken aback by how virulent these strains were".[27] This study supported the observation that wounds inflicted by the Komodo dragon are often associated with sepsis and subsequent infections in prey animals.[26]

In late 2005, researchers at the University of Melbourne speculated that the perentie (Varanus giganteus), other species of monitor, and agamids may be somewhat venomous. The team believes that the immediate effects of bites from these lizards were caused by mild envenomation. Bites on human digits by a lace monitor (V. varius), a Komodo dragon, and a spotted tree monitor (V. scalaris) all produced similar effects: rapid swelling, localized disruption of blood clotting, and shooting pain up to the elbow, with some symptoms lasting for several hours.[28]

In 2009, the same researchers published further evidence demonstrating that Komodo dragons possess a venomous bite. MRI scans of a preserved skull showed the presence of two venom glands in the lower jaw. They extracted one of these glands from the head of a terminally ill specimen in the Singapore Zoological Gardens, and found that it secreted a venom containing several different toxic proteins. The known functions of these proteins include inhibition of blood clotting, lowering of blood pressure, muscle paralysis, and the induction of hypothermia, leading to shock and loss of consciousness in envenomated prey.[29][30] As a result of the discovery, the previous theory that bacteria were responsible for the deaths of komodo victims was disputed.[31]

It has been proposed that all venomous lizards, together with their nonvenomous relatives and all snakes, share a common venomous ancestor.[28]


[edit] Reproduction
Mating occurs between May and August, with the eggs laid in September.[9] During this period, males fight over females and territory by grappling with one another upon their hind legs with the loser eventually being pinned to the ground. These males may vomit or defecate when preparing for the fight.[16] The winner of the fight will then flick his long tongue at the female to gain information about her receptivity.[6] Females are antagonistic and resist with their claws and teeth during the early phases of courtship. Therefore, the male must fully restrain the female during coitus to avoid being hurt. Other courtship displays include males rubbing their chins on the female, hard scratches to the back, and licking.[32] Copulation occurs when the male inserts one of his hemipenes into the female's cloaca.[14] Komodo dragons may be monogamous and form "pair bonds", a rare behavior for lizards.[16]


A Komodo dragon with its long tail and claws fully visibleThe female lays her eggs in burrows cut into the side of a hill or in the abandoned nesting mounds of the Orange-footed Scrubfowl (a moundbuilder or megapode), with a preference for the abandoned mounds.[33] Clutches contain an average of 20 eggs which have an incubation period of 7–8 months.[16] The female lies on the eggs to incubate and protect them until they hatch around April, at the end of the rainy season when insects are plentiful. Hatching is an exhausting effort for the pups, who break out of their eggshells with an egg tooth that falls off soon after. After cutting out the hatchlings may lie in their eggshells for hours before starting to dig out of the nest. They are born quite defenseless, and many are eaten by predators.[11]

Young Komodo dragons spend much of their first few years in trees, where they are relatively safe from predators, including cannibalistic adults, who make juvenile dragons 10% of their diet.[16] According to David Attenborough, the habit of cannibalism may be advantageous in sustaining the large size of adults, as medium-sized prey on the islands is rare.[21] When the young must approach a kill, they roll around in fecal matter and rest in the intestines of eviscerated animals to deter these hungry adults.[16] Komodo dragons take about three to five years to mature, and may live for up to 50 years.[17]


[edit] Parthenogenesis
Main article: Parthenogenesis
A Komodo dragon at London Zoo named Sungai laid a clutch of eggs in late 2005 after being separated from male company for more than two years. Scientists initially assumed that she had been able to store sperm from her earlier encounter with a male, an adaptation known as superfecundation.[34] On December 20, 2006, it was reported that Flora, a captive Komodo dragon living in the Chester Zoo in England, was the second known Komodo dragon to have laid unfertilized eggs: she laid 11 eggs, and 7 of them hatched, all of them male.[35] Scientists at Liverpool University in England performed genetic tests on three eggs that collapsed after being moved to an incubator, and verified that Flora had never been in physical contact with a male dragon. After Flora's eggs' condition had been discovered, testing showed that Sungai's eggs were also produced without outside fertilization.[36]


A parthenogenetic baby Komodo dragon, Chester Zoo, EnglandKomodo dragons have the ZW chromosomal sex-determination system, as opposed to the mammalian XY system. Male progeny prove that Flora's unfertilized eggs were haploid (n) and doubled their chromosomes later to become diploid (2n) (by being fertilized by a polar body, or by chromosome duplication without cell division), rather than by her laying diploid eggs by one of the meiosis reduction-divisions in her ovaries failing). When a female Komodo dragon (with ZW sex chromosomes) reproduces in this manner, she provides her progeny with only one chromosome from each of her pairs of chromosomes, including only one of her two sex chromosomes. This single set of chromosomes is duplicated in the egg, which develops parthenogenetically. Eggs receiving a Z chromosome become ZZ (male); those receiving a W chromosome become WW and fail to develop.[37][38]

It has been hypothesized that this reproductive adaptation allows a single female to enter an isolated ecological niche (such as an island) and by parthenogenesis produce male offspring, thereby establishing a sexually reproducing population (via reproduction with her offspring that can result in both male and female young).[37] Despite the advantages of such an adaptation, zoos are cautioned that parthenogenesis may be detrimental to genetic diversity.[39]

On January 31, 2008, the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas became the first zoo in the Americas to document parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons. The zoo has two adult female Komodo dragons, one of which laid about 17 eggs on May 19–20, 2007. Only two eggs were incubated and hatched due to space issues; the first hatched on January 31, 2008 while the second hatched on February 1. Both hatchlings were males.[40][41]


[edit] History

[edit] Discovery by the Western world

Komodo dragon coin, issued by IndonesiaKomodo dragons were first documented by Europeans in 1910, when rumors of a "land crocodile" reached Lieutenant van Steyn van Hensbroek of the Dutch colonial administration.[42] Widespread notoriety came after 1912, when Peter Ouwens, the director of the Zoological Museum at Bogor, Java, published a paper on the topic after receiving a photo and a skin from the lieutenant, as well as two other specimens from a collector.[2] Later, the Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and 2 live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong.[43] It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."[19] Three of his specimens were stuffed and are still on display in the American Museum of Natural History.[44]


[edit] Studies
The Dutch, realizing the limited number of individuals in the wild, outlawed sport hunting and heavily limited the number of individuals taken for scientific study. Collecting expeditions ground to a halt with the occurrence of World War II, not resuming until the 1950s and 1960s, when studies examined the Komodo dragon's feeding behavior, reproduction, and body temperature. At around this time, an expedition was planned in which a long-term study of the Komodo dragon would be undertaken. This task was given to the Auffenberg family, who stayed on Komodo Island for 11 months in 1969. During their stay, Walter Auffenberg and his assistant Putra Sastrawan captured and tagged more than 50 Komodo dragons.[27] The research from the Auffenberg expedition would prove to be enormously influential in raising Komodo dragons in captivity.[3] Research after the Auffenberg family has shed more light on the nature of the Komodo dragon, with biologists such as Claudio Ciofi continuing to study the creatures.[45]


[edit] Danger to humans
Although attacks are very rare, Komodo dragons have been known to attack humans; five people have been killed since 1974. These fatal attacks were in 1974, 2000, 2005, 2007 [46] and 2009. They are considered especially dangerous to children. On June 4, 2007 a Komodo dragon attacked an eight-year-old boy on Komodo Island. The boy later died of massive bleeding from his wounds. It was the first recorded fatal attack in 33 years.[47] Natives blamed the attack on environmentalists outside the island prohibiting goat sacrifices. This denied the Komodo dragons their expected food source, causing them to wander into human civilization in search of food. A belief held by many natives of Komodo Island is that Komodo dragons are actually the reincarnation of fellow kinspeople and should thus be treated with reverence.[48][49]

On March 24, 2009, two Komodo Dragons attacked and killed fisherman Muhamad Anwar on Komodo. Anwar was attacked after he fell out of a sugar-apple tree and was left bleeding badly from bites to his hands, body, legs, and neck. He was taken to a clinic on the neighboring island of Flores where he was pronounced dead on arrival.[50]


[edit] Conservation

A basking Komodo dragon photographed at Disney's Animal KingdomThe Komodo dragon is a vulnerable species and is found on the IUCN Red List.[51] There are approximately 4,000–5,000 living Komodo dragons in the wild. Their populations are restricted to the islands of Gili Motang (100), Gili Dasami (100), Rinca (1,300), Komodo (1,700), and Flores (perhaps 2,000).[3] However, there are concerns that there may presently be only 350 breeding females.[8] To address these concerns, the Komodo National Park was founded in 1980 to protect Komodo dragon populations on islands including Komodo, Rinca, and Padar.[52] Later, the Wae Wuul and Wolo Tado Reserves were opened on Flores to aid with Komodo dragon conservation.[45] There is evidence that Komodo dragons became accustomed to human presence, as they were often fed animal carcasses at several feeding stations by tourists and sacrifices from natives before a hunt.[4][48] As these practices have been outlawed, attacks on humans by the lizards has increased.[48]

Volcanic activity, earthquakes, loss of habitat, fire (the population at Padar was almost destroyed because of a wildfire, and has since mysteriously disappeared),[11][45] loss of prey, tourism, and poaching have all contributed to the vulnerable status of the Komodo dragon. Under Appendix I of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), commercial trade of skins or specimens is illegal.[15][53]

The Australian biologist Tim Flannery has suggested that the Australian ecosystem may benefit from the introduction of Komodo dragons, as it could partially occupy the large-carnivore niche left vacant following the extinction of the giant varanid Megalania. However, he argues for great caution and gradualness in these acclimatisation experiments, especially as "the problem of predation of large varanids upon humans should not be understated". He uses the example of the successful coexistence with saltwater crocodiles as evidence that Australians could successfully adjust.[54]


[edit] In captivity

A Komodo dragon at Smithsonian National Zoological Park. Despite the visible earholes, Komodo dragons cannot hear very well.Komodo dragons have long been great zoo attractions, where their size and reputation make them popular exhibits. They are, however, rare in zoos because they are susceptible to infection and parasitic disease if captured from the wild, and do not readily reproduce.[8] As of May 2009, there are 13 European, 2 African, 35 North American, 1 Singaporean, and 2 Australian institutions that keep Komodo dragons.[55]

The first Komodo dragon was exhibited in 1934 at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, but it lived for only two years. More attempts to exhibit Komodo dragons were made, but the lifespan of these creatures was very short, averaging five years in the National Zoological Park. Studies done by Walter Auffenberg, which were documented in his book The Behavioral Ecology of the Komodo Monitor, eventually allowed for more successful managing and reproducing of the dragons in captivity.[3]

It has been observed in captive dragons that many individuals display relatively tame behavior within a short period of time in captivity. Many occurrences are reported where keepers have brought the animals out of their enclosures to interact with zoo visitors, including young children, to no harmful effect.[56][57] Dragons are also capable of recognizing individual humans. Ruston Hartdegen of the Dallas Zoo reported that their Komodo dragons reacted differently when presented with their regular keeper, a less familiar keeper, or a completely unfamiliar keeper.[58]

Research with captive Komodo dragons has also provided evidence that they engage in play. One study concerned an individual who would push a shovel left by its keeper, apparently attracted to the sound of it scraping across the rocky surface. A young female dragon at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. would grab and shake various objects including statues, beverage cans, plastic rings and blankets. She would also insert her head into boxes, shoes, and other objects. She did not confuse these objects with food, as she would only swallow them if they were covered in rat blood. This social play has led to a striking comparison with mammalian play.[6]


Komodo dragons at Toronto Zoo. Komodo dragons in captivity often grow fat, especially in their tails, due to regular feeding.Another documentation of play in Komodo dragons comes from the University of Tennessee, where a young Komodo dragon named "Kraken" interacted with plastic rings, a shoe, a bucket, and a tin can by nudging them with her snout, swiping at them, and carrying them around in her mouth. She treated all of them differently than her food, prompting leading researcher Gordon Burghardt to conclude that they disprove the view of object play being "food-motivated predatory behavior." Kraken was the first Komodo dragon hatched in captivity outside of Indonesia, born in the National Zoo on September 13, 1992.[9][59]

Even seemingly docile dragons may become aggressive unpredictably, especially when the animal's territory is invaded by someone unfamiliar. In June 2001, a Komodo dragon seriously injured Phil Bronstein—executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle—when he entered its enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo after being invited in by its keeper. Bronstein was bitten on his bare foot, as the keeper had told him to take off his white shoes, which could have potentially excited the Komodo dragon.[60][61] Although he escaped, he needed to have several tendons in his foot reattached surgically.[62]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_Dragon

Dogs

Image by gichurl
I've shot this picture when the bart passes between San Francisco port and West Oakland. Those facilities are probably designed for containers or other shipment but for it looked like giant iron dog. Whenever I see this image, I keep think about the end of the organic beings, where all the people or animal are extinct... Those dogs walk slowly slowly through the port and very few survivors see them through spy-glasses.

Bornean Bearcat

Image by Travis S.
This bearcat is neither a bear nor a cat. The traditional name, Binturong, was given to the animal by language culture that is now extinct so its meaning is unknown.

It eats fruits, eggs, leaves, small mammals and birds. It has a tail that is prehensile. I don't think I would mess with this animal.

Mermaid and Plantem

Check out these animals that are extinct images:

Mermaid and Plantem

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!

skinny dipping girls

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!

Faerie Dance 2012

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!

Nice Animals That Are Extinct photos

Some cool animals that are extinct images:

3 faeries 2012

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!

Hot Faerie 2012

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!

merry pranksters

Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>

“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.

“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.

“No?”

“No – in Japan, many hippie!”

“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.

“That right.”

Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.

“But not in Japan.”

“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”

Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”

“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.

“No – about the same size, but different.”

“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.

“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.

“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”

“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”

Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”

“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.

“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”

“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.

“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.

“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.

“Ah!”

“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.

“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”

“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.

“What that animal?” Zen enquired.

“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”

“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.

“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.

“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”

“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.

“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”

“You not see it before?”

“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”

“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.

Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”

“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.

“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”

“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”

“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”

“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.

Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”

The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”

“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.

“What they call ‘global warming’.”

“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”

“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”

“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”

“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”

“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”

“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”

“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.

“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”

“A koll?” Zen asked.

“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”

“Like koala?”

“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”

“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”

“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”

“You see one of them but black?”

“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”

“That big?”

“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”

“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.

“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”

“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.

“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”

“Ahh.”

“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.

“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”

“Why not?”

“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.

“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.

“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”

“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”

“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.

“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”

“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.

“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.

“So this quoll not extinct?”

“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”

“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.

“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”

“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.

“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”

“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.

“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”

“Pelt?”

“Skins,” Cameron translated.

“…and the pelts were all female.”

“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”

“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”

“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.

“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”

“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.


A true story
By R. Ayana

Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!