Category: Field Notes
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All the lapwings are called John
A lone female masked lapwing ( Vanellus miles, also: plover, bloody plover, melted cheese face) haunts the Blue Mountains Bushwalk exhibit at Taronga Zoo. Over 18-months of regular visits to the enclosure, we have developed a kind of kinship with John. One of the volunteers told us that all the masked lapwings are called John Travolta…
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Stitching with Regent Honeyeaters
When we began this project in 2018, our primary intent for it was to be a creative practice collaboration. The number of talks and publications from the project since then might suggest that no longer to be the case. Yet in the background we both continue to make creative works in response to what we…
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TR Taronga Zoo field report #1
This report covers visits taken place on January 7 (with Zoe), February 3 (with Zoe), April 2 (on my own), and April 22 (with Zoe), 2021. I also visited Taronga Zoo on May 15, but being with family I did not visit the regent honeyeaters. This report is an attempt to respond to the first…
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Birds of Mallacoota by Nick Ritar
Following the New Year’s Eve bushfire that forced most of Mallacoota’s residents on its beach, Nick Ritar of Milkwood, a permaculture smallholding, documented some of the avian victims on January 2, 2020. The images are posted here with Nick’s permission. Thank you, Nick, for documenting this event so that we can all bear witness. Nick’s…
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Pentti Linkola
Pentti Linkola is something of a conscience for Finland and for humanity. His ideas are radical, often shocking and sometimes dangerous. Yet I’ve shared some of his thoughts in moments, as a visceral reaction to the persistent destruction of the biosphere that I have witnessed, and contributed to, throughout my life. While a lot of…
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Braiding Sweetgrass
“Weep! Weep! calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” A friend and colleague recommended Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass a few months ago.…
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Storytelling for the uncanny present
While overseas in November, I caught snippets of news from home: unprecedented bushfire smoke choking major cities; koala populations declared functionally extinct (not all koalas); heritage-listed rainforests burning; farmers traumatised by the screams of dying animals. From afar, these unsettling accounts seem fictional, like the ‘raining frogs’ in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Except in Anderson’s…
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Remembering buntings, forgetting buntings
The Ortolan Bunting and Yellow-breasted Bunting were plentiful during the first decade of my childhood. (I was born in 1975.) The latter was never common in Finland; the country was on the edge of its distribution, but it was an abundant birds throughout its range across northern Eurasia. Well, no more. Yellow-breasted Buntings are no…
PRECARIOUS BIRDS 