I was up in King Spark* yesterday waiting for one of my clients to finish an appointment at Charlies and I found a book called The Owls of Australia: A Field Guide to Australian Night Birds, by Stephen Debus. It’s effectively a cut-down version of the relevant bits of Vol 4 of HANZAB — which I’d love to own, but it costs more than it’d take to get a Pom into a bath.
[[* Don’t ever try the coffee there!]]
Flipped through and found the Christmas Island Hawk-Owl (Ninox natalis) what I’d never heard of before. Not really surprising, though, cos no-one, including the Department of Immigration, seems to think it’s actually Australian. The Island I mean.
The facts are stranger than a moderately strange thing. It’s called natalis after the Island. Geddit? It’s only recently become a species as such, having once been conspecific with something oriental. It’s threatened and is (or was) listed as critically endangered. The threats include:
• the Yellow Crazy Ant (Cirrhosus Adamii) and its supercolonies (!) which destroy habitat.
Lesson: kill some ants today — for they will surely take over otherwise.
• phosphate mining.
Lesson: stop digging things up — we don’t need most of them anyway.
• as below:
In 1987 the owl’s remaining habitat was protected within the Christmas Island National Park. However, part of the Park has since been annexed by the Australian Government for the construction of a detention centre for refugees, with mandatory environmental-impact assessment requirements waived ‘in the national interest’. (page 49)Lesson: don’t vote for those who advocate (1) dumping those in, literally, dire straits and so (2) seeing off these little guys:
