We share a fascination with raptors and in her most recent message she said:

Solitary Hawk! LIFER! 4 million migrating raptors for this season – not bad and still expecting four hundred thousand Turkey Vultures…Veracruz – River of Raptors.

Photo: Mercy Njeri

Mercy has been chasing the annual migratory movements of millions of raptors through the northern continental Americas and is now in Veracruz – where there is literally an aerial River of Raptors.

The wonderful people at HawkWatch International tell me will give Mercy and all the other lucky souls great views of:

Each fall, 4-6 million raptors migrate through Veracruz on their way to winter ranges in Central and South America. Because of the region’s geography, raptors from eastern, central, and western North America converge, providing visitors with a display unequaled anywhere on the planet.

As many as 2 million Broad-winged Hawks, 1 million Swainson’s Hawks, and 200,000 Mississippi Kites–nearly the entire world population for these three species–pass through Veracruz each fall. In addition, more than 1.5 million Turkey Vultures join the flight, as do thousands of other raptors, waterbirds, and songbirds.

Combine this with the hundreds of resident bird species in the state of Veracruz, and the scores of Olmec, Totonac, and Aztec archeological sites, all set in the friendly, unspoiled culture of east central Mexico, and you have the adventure of a lifetime.

Anyway – back to the barbie.

As anyone who has spent time in Mexico or the south-western USA will know, Armadillos are relatively common, and, as this entry at Wikipedia says:

Armadillos (mainly Dasypus) make common roadkill due to their habit of jumping to about fender height when startled (such as by an oncoming car). Wildlife enthusiasts are using the northward march of the armadillo as an opportunity to educate others about the animals, which can be a burrowing nuisance to property owners and managers.

Roadkill Armadillo. Photo: Professional Wildlife Removal

Anyway, in Mercy’s travels in Veracruz someone came up with the idea of barbecuing a few Armadillos.

Photo: Mercy Njeri

Mercy says that she is a bit ambivalent about the experience – delicious but:

Spiced Armadillo…poa lakini…ni Bush Meat…though nilimanga…now I am a vegetarian by circumstances…

Shell yenyewe ni ka ya tortoise…ati no nyama…tuiohere mehia maitu nitondu tutiui uria tureka…!

Super delicious, better than Crocodile meat!

Mercy told me that:

I preferred not to look at what i was munching because it gave me memories of our endangered African Elephant Shrew found in the Arabuko Sokoke Forest!

The meal is typical of traditional Mexican food. Eaten by locals and cannot be found in the markets – only occasionally in the homes of the locals. These was brought for us by the father of one of my colleague’s from upcountry.

Mercy didn’t have a recipe – “It’s a Mexican secret!!” – but I found this one from the folks over at Backwoods Bound:

Bar-B-Q’d Armadillo

Thanks to Jason Hunter for sending this recipe.

~ 1 armadillo

~ bacon grease

~ 1 cup butter

~ 1/2 cup ketchup

~ 1/2 cup grated onion

~ 2 tbsp mustard

~ tabasco to taste

In a sauce pan, combine the butter, ketchup, onion, mustard and tabasco. Heat over low heat until the butter is melted. Stir occasionally.

Rub bacon grease into the armadillo.

Grill over a hot fire for 5 minutes.

Reduce the fire by half.

Baste the meat with the sauce until done. Armadillo is cooked like pork.

Serve and Enjoy!

Serve and enjoy indeed! Photo: Mercy Njeri

THESE PICTURES WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Plastic cigarette lighters, bottle tops, fishing line, fishing lures, parts of shoes, plastic bags – just about anything we get rid of ends up here – in the guts of these baby albatrosses hatched and dead after a too-short life at Midway Atoll in the mid-Pacific.

And all this in a marine reserve, thousands of miles from any continental shore.

I came across these shots from a post by my very good friends at the Southern Ocean Seabirds Study Association (SOSSA) with whom I’ve had the rare pleasures on several occasions of sitting on a rusty boat thirty or so miles offshore from Wollongong with a half-dozen or so very large albatrosses sitting on laps on the wet-deck waiting to be measured, tagged, weighed and released – for the purposes of long-standing scientific research into these most magnificent seabirds.

I’ve written here before about why I take photographs of things that have been killed by human actions – in my case I mostly take photos of roadkill the victims of impacts with our cars that we drive too foolishly and too fast on our roads.

I take these photos because I want to bear witness and attest to the fact of their deaths and to maybe provoke at least one person to slow down when they see a group of large birds ripping into a kangaroo, wallaby or cattle carcass on the highway.

Or to stop and drag that carcass off the roadway and well into the bushes…

And these are the same sentiments that I suspect provide Chris Jordan with the motivation to do what he and his team do so well – documenting the monstrous impacts that the human animal has on this fragile planet.

These photos were taken in Midway Atoll, which the Midway Journey site tells me is:

…a collection of three small islands in the North Pacific, about halfway between the U.S. and Asia, and one of the remotest places on earth.

It is located near the apex of the Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling soup of millions of tons of plastic pollution. The islands are covered with plastic garbage, illustrating on several levels the interconnectedness and interdependence of the systems on our finite planet.

Midway Atoll, one of the remotest islands on earth, is a kaleidoscope of geography, culture, human history, and natural wonder. It also serves as a lens into one of the most profound and symbolic environmental tragedies of our time: the deaths by starvation of thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food.

You can find out more about this remarkable trip by a team led by renowned photographer Chris Jordan at his home page here and see a whole lot more photographs, documentation and videos at the Midway Journey site here.

And these are true documents of distant and lonely deaths.

As Chris says:

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries.

Enough talk – look at these photos – and then tell me that you don’t care about the junk we pump into the ocean every day!

Now – it worked huh – feel like shit?

Want to do something about this – change your life?

Join the good people at SOSSA or go to Chris Jordan’s home page and donate to support the work they are doing.

Or stop buying plastic cigarette lighters, stupid plastic drink bottles and don’t ever throw your fishing lines overboard…

And please, if you have something to say – register and leave a comment here!

“Rust In Peace‘ is scrawled on the side of the sorry remains of this poor little Jayco pop-top caravan abandoned about 50 metres off the Central Arnhem Road 460 kilometres ir so from the Stuart Highway.

The poor thing had obviously had a hard life and, having just dragged my vehicle up the same road, I know that it would have been having a very hard time of it – at least my vehicle is built to take these roads – this poor thing was built for freeways and suburban roads. That it lasted the best part of 30 years is some kind of testament to either the people that built it or the care of the drivers that owned it.

And the owners obviously got their moneys worth – as the shot below indicates, they had been dragging it around the countryside for the best part of 30 years until it finally expired on a dusty, corrugated stretch of road in the centre of Arnhem Land sometime earlier this year.

And as the good people at the East Arnhem Land Tourist Association reckon, there are at least two good reasons why dragging a caravan up the Central Arnhem Road is not recommended:

The Central Arnhem Road is not recommended for caravans, only sturdy off-road camper trailers. The Northern Land Council will not approve a permit to tow a caravan into East Arnhem Land and Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation will not issue a Visitor Recreation Permit to anyone with a caravan.

]]> http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/10/13/roadkill-of-the-week-jayco-poptop-caravan-central-arnhem-road/feed/ 6 http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/09/16/roadkill-of-the-week-yinkardakurdaku-spotted-nightjar/ http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/09/16/roadkill-of-the-week-yinkardakurdaku-spotted-nightjar/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:15:08 +0000 Bob Gosford http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/?p=1782

Spotted Nightjar Eurostopodus argus

I came across this road-killed Spotted Nightjar (Eurostopodus argus) a hundred or so kilometres up the Tanami Track from my home at Yuendumu just after setting off on my current trip that will take me through the east and western Kimberleys, to Broome (where I am now) and down to the Pilbara, where I’ll be heading tomorrow.

There are Aboriginal stories about the Spotted Nightjar right across Australia – but because I found this one in Warlpiri country I’ll include a couple of references from paintings made by several of the Warlpiri painters that work at the Warlukurlangu Artists centre at Yuendumu.

To the Warlpiri the Spotted Nightjar is known as Yinkardakurdaku.

In common with many naming systems across Australia, many birds in the Warlpiri world-view are named onomatopoeically – thus the name for the Spotted Nightjar in Warlpiri sounds, if you bend your ear and imagination just a little, very much like the main breeding season call used by the bird about this time of year.

I heard my first for the year a few weeks back while walking our dogs a few kilometres outside of town one evening.

To me the call sounds like water flowing out of a narrow-necked bottle, a beautiful succession of fluid sounds ending in an almost joyous climax, though I can imagine that for some unfamiliar with their call that it could be quite a surprise on a dark night – it is a remarkable thing.

You can hear the call of the Spotted Nightjar for yourself here as a QuickTime file: the Yinkardakurdaku’s call.

Courtesy of Warlukurlangu Artists at Yuendumu here are two representative stories for the Yinkardakurdaku from two different locations in Warlpiri country, firstly from Mawurriji:

Yinkardakurdaku Jukurrpa (Spotted Nightjar dreaming) (Mawurriji)

The Yinkardakurdaku (Spotted Nightjar, Eurostopodus argus) ancestor was sitting down and making spears (Jarljarri) at Mawurrji, west of Yuendumu.

When Yinkardakurdaku had finished it stood up and threw the spears to the north (Yatija-rra), south (Kurla-rni), east (Kakarra) and to the west (Karla-rra).

During their flight and upon landing the spears created many important Mulju (soakages) and Warnirri (rockholes) that are still evident in the landscape today.

The water from these Mulju and Warnirri later spread underground to form the river and creek-beds found throughout Warlpiri country.

And also here from Yampirri:

Yinkardakurdaku Jukurrpa (Spotted Nightjar dreaming) (Yampirri)

This print represents the travels of Yinkardakurdaku (Spotted Nightjar, Eurostopodus argus), a large bird (Jurlpu) with a brown breast that was living near to Yampirri, near Kunajarrayi, to the west of Yuendumu and Nyirrpi.

Yinkardakurdaku was an heroic ancestor who was both a bird and man. He flew back and forth – east (Kakarra) to the west (Karla-rra) and back again. He always returned to Yampirri where there is a cave [Pirnki].

He travelled far, visiting a big bloodwood tree near the present site of Yuendumu. He even flew to Kulpurlu, to the east in Alyawarr country.

Yampirri is an important men’s ceremonial site; a place to teach Kajirri (’high school’) to young men. The circle in the centre of the painting represent Yampirri. The other circles refer to places he visited on his travels. Japaljarri men are also represented. The footprints (Wirliya) of Yinkardakurdaku have also been represented.

Of the hundreds of highway death scenes I’ve stopped at over the years this latest would qualify as one of the worst and most distressing.

Ten days or so ago I was driving homewards up the single-lane strip of bitumen that passes for a highway in this part of the world and had pulled off onto the red dirt verge to allow a roadtrain to pass.

That truck was just one of the many 140-tonne, four-trailer behemoths that do the 1100 kilometre round trip up the Tanami Track from Alice Springs carting diesel fuel, cyanide and other essentials to The Granites mine.

You always get off the road for those guys.

One hundred metres up the road I noticed a common indicator of a recent bird killing zone – for 100 metres or so the ground and short grass alongside the road was littered with downy feathers,with a scatter of larger feathers blowing around in the stiff breeze.

I stopped, got out of the car and looked about me.

In the middle of the road was a large, slowly congealing pool of blood, with large splatters indicating that whatever – most likely a large kangaroo – had died here and had been hit by an inbound vehicle.

There was no sign of any kangaroo carcass close handy – maybe some caring driver or a hungry Dingo had dragged it off the road and well into the scrub, thus saving a few more birds from an untimely death.

As I looked at this scene more closely the true horror  of what had happened emerged. All about me lay  the scattered, shattered remains – here the severed head shown above, there a leg – stripped of flesh, next to the road another head, ten feet away a razor-taloned foot, wing and tail – this time of a younger bird.

An open-air slaughter house – whatever had happened here had been brief and incredibly brutal – two  Wedgetailed Eagles had been hit and torn – literally – limb from feathered limb, ground into paste on the road and left for the carrion-eaters.

The horror, the horror.

I can say no more – let my pictures bear witness and tell their own story.

It is wintertime here in the north so our roads are clogged with hordes of southern tourists towing caravans.

Last week I drove south from Katherine to Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway and passed wave after wave of these brave souls venturing forth into the wilds in search of…well just what they seek escapes me. On one long, flat stretch of road south of Tennant Creek I counted 12 caravans stretching away in the distance – swarming from over their borders northward.

I have an occasional mean thought that when the get to Darwin they will all run out of road, over a cliff and into the Arafura Sea.

And the rest of the morning was the same – here a posse of 10 or so together, then a few singletons, then another cluster – and oh, look – a truck, a car, a bus…

There are three major classes of caravanners – the young families dragging their kids around the country during the school holidays or on some extended wagging session; the off-roaders, dragging purpose-built off-road trailers and caravans that wander well off the bitumen and into the dusty back-blocks; and the largest group – mum and pop dragging a tin box the size of a small house, and costing just as much, behind a late model four-wheel drive.

It is this last group that interests me most – they set out from their cold southern homes sometime in May or June and head north like a horde of plague locusts – I don’t know why – but it seems to me that most of them spend much of their time up here either locked in the car driving from point to point or in the ‘van in the company of their spouse or others doing exactly the same as them.

You know them as well as I do – they are that generation just older than us – Dad with his polyester shorts, paunch and enlarged prostate – Mum with her knitting and her obsessions with cleanliness and that little notebook with fuel prices and calculations of fuel consumption tucked away in the glovebox and pulled out for analysis at every refuelling stop.

And what do they do? Well, they spend a lot of time crawling along the highway at 80 km/h – to the absolute frustration of anyone wanting to travel a little faster than that; they cluster at the overnight roadside rest stops and caravan parks with other caravanners where they inspect each others rigs and debate the price of fuel, the state of the road and the rudeness of any driver that objects to their snail-pace progress across the country; and, it seems to me, not much more.

And they whinge – a lot – about each other, the state of things – anything – here that is different from home, about blackfellas, the price of fuel, the price of any thing slightly more expensive than at “home”, anyone who objects to their god-given right to go anywhere and do just about anything, the chihuahua’s constipation…

But I can’t object to any of that – if they want to live substantially the same lives here as they do in the suburbs at home well good luck to them – what I cannot understand is why you would drag yourself, your purported loved one and all the junk you can cram into a tin box across the north for a few months every year but so fundamentally fail to connect with the country and the people that live in it.

I know that is most likely a gross generalisation but many caravanners seem to be just too timid to actually connect with the reality of people and place up here – in many ways it is like those package tour to Europe – 30 countries in 30 days in a bus – you can come home and say “I’ve been to Paris, London and Bruges” – but if all you’ve done is see it through the windows of a bus then you haven’t really been to those places at all.

And the same goes for too many of the caravanners – they can say “I’ve been to Katherine, Darwin and Kununurra” but if all they did was drive from roadside stop to caravan park to service station can they honestly say they’ve been here at all?

Your thoughts please.

Feral Cat, Phillip Creek Station, NT

I don’t see too many feral cats while I’m driving around – I saw this one this past Sunday while driving south from Wycliffe Well to Alice Springs close to the Phillip Creek bridge on the Stuart Highway and I would have only seen perhaps a dozen dead roadside cats in many years driving the highways and backroads of the NT.

Most feral cats are just too clever to get caught out on the roadway. I’ve seen a few close to and crossing the road, and, like the birds that are drawn to roadkill carcasses on the roadway and roadside, feral cats most likely find that roadways provide good foraging grounds to prey on the many small birds and lizards that form the less visible side to the carnage that we cause in our obsessions with getting from A to B in the quickest way possible.

Two of my least favourite things...

Sometime ago when I was a law student I was the foreman on a murder trial in the Supreme Court of the NT, but that’s a whole different story that I can’t say too much about.

One interesting item that has stuck in my memory from the three weeks spent in and out of the Jury Room was that much of the reading material provided there consisted of back copies of Australian Shooter – The magazine for sporting shooters. In one copy of the magazine there was an article written by a team of keen shooters who had been engaged by the NT government to conduct a survey of the long stretches of the Barkly Highway that runs from just north of Tennant Creek in the NT across to Mt Isa in Queensland.

What they found was fascinating – from memory they ended up with a feral cat head count of some several hundred cats – mostly found in the many tunnels and culverts running under the road. And they developed some interesting hunting techniques – they would stop some way away from the tunnel or culvert and walk up on either side of the tunnel, which appear to be a favourite day-time rest spots for feral cats. A couple of shotgun loads would be shot into the tunnel from one side followed by a similar load from the other. Then the carnage would be inspected…

Nobody knows to any degree of certainty just how many feral cats there are in Australia – let alone in the NT – and perhaps the number of these most effective and efficient killers out there is irrelevant – what might be more important is the effect of their predation, particularly of vulnerable populations of small mammals and birds.

The NT Department of Natural Resources advises that:

Feral cats have been in Australia since European settlement. They live independently of humans and are found in all habitats ranging from rainforest to desert throughout the Northern Territory.

…

Feral cats are secretive, cryptic, largely nocturnal and hard to catch which makes it difficult to monitor populations, especially over large areas. Available data indicate that feral cat populations fluctuate markedly in time and space. Densities can be high in some areas when conditions are favourable. During 1994, for example, the density of feral cats on the Barkly Tableland during an eruption of the Long-haired Rat, Rattus villosissimus, was estimated at 6.3/km2. In arid areas population densities of about 0.2/km2 are more typical. Male feral cats in the mulga woodlands of central Australia live in large territories approximately 2210 ha in size. However, in the tropics and in areas with rabbits, home ranges are likely to be much smaller.

…

Whether through predation, disease or competition, feral cats have undoubtedly played a role in the demise and extinction of native fauna, particularly in central Australia. A reintroduction programme for the Rufous Hare-wallaby or Mala (Lagorchestes hirsutus) in the Tanami Desert during the 1980s was unsuccessful due to predation by feral cats.

And I haven’t yet found a definition of just when a cat can be classed as feral or domestic companion animal – my own definition is a very narrow one – any cat outside of its own yard is a feral cat!

Diamond Dove Geopelia cuneata

I hit this bird while driving back to Katherine in the NT from Warmun in WA yesterday.

I saw a blur of dark feathers moving from my right, then heard and felt the slightest of bumps and next saw a small cloud of downy feathers in the car’s wake.

I stopped, turned and bore witness to the death of this small wonder.

A day or two earlier I saw this one – not hit by me but by someone else.

Red Fox Vulpes vulpes - The Coorong, SA

I came across this beautiful – even in death – example of a Red Fox in my recent travels in the Coorong in the south-east of South Australia.

The Red Fox was introduced to Australia in the mid-1850s by the gloriously named Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, which was the principal body responsible for the introduction of a number of nominally useful, but now well-established pest or nuisance species to Australia.

The Red Fox is now found across mainland Australia apart from the tropical north and some offshore islands. In recent years it appears that Tasmania, which had been considered fox-free until about 2001, now has a resident population – most likely introduced by some modern-day acclimatisationalist.

Foxes are notoriously cunning and capable hunters and have played a significant role in the decline of many ground-nesting and foraging birds, a number of our small to medium sized mammals including the greater Bilby, and has been a significant predator of vulnerable reptiles such as the green turtle.

The Fox is also believed to be a major contributor to the significant declines in populations of many other threatened species, including the Bridled Nail-tail Wallaby and the enigmatic Night Parrot. Foxes have also been blamed for significant stock losses to farmers by preying on newborn lambs, goats and poultry and could also be a vector of rabies, in the event that
disease be introduced into Australia.

The Introduced Plants and Animals of Victoria website says that the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria consisted of an:

“…august group of men, all Europeans, reasoned that life in the new colony would be improved by the addition of true game species such as deer. Their first preference was for Red Deer (Cervus elephas), a native to England and Europe, which was considered to be the noblest of animals for gentlemen to hunt.

The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria replaced the Zoological Society of Victoria in the early 1860s and was responsible for managing the Melbourne Zoological Gardens. In 1872 the Society’s name was changed to recognise its broader interests, then being renamed the Zoological and Acclimatisation Society of Victoria.

Acclimatisation societies were found throughout the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US – being particularly influential in Australia and New Zealand in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They represented a desire to introduce animals and birds that could be hunted or that familiarised the foreign lands of those colonies and to remind the settlers of their distant “home”.