Although this strange animal looks like an alien hybrid of a porcupine and an anteater, it’s neither a rodent like the porcupine nor a typical mammal like the anteater. This is a short-beaked echidna, found in Australia and New Guinea. Echidnas, also called spiny anteaters, are monotremes, a mammal that lays eggs. The only other egg-laying mammal in the world is the platypus.

The mother lays an egg, and it’s incubated in a temporary pouch. Once the egg hatches, the baby echidna—called a puggle—stays in the pouch and laps up milk from special glands called milk patches. Unlike other mammals, echidnas do not have nipples. The puggle stays in the pouch for about two months, when it begins to grow spines. The mother then moves it from her pouch to a burrow and cares for it the next seven months. Echidnas nest in burrows that other animals have left behind or they can sleep in hollow logs, rock crevices, under bushes, or in piles of leaves.

Echidnas use their narrow snout, which functions as both a nose and mouth, to search out ants, termites, spiders, worms, and other larvae. They capture their food with a long, sticky tongue. They can forage up to 18 hours a day and are most active from dusk until dawn.

Their spines are a specialized kind of hair and are used for defense. When attacked, they will curl up like a hedgehog. They can also use their powerful claws to bury themselves in the ground to get away from an attacker.

Here are five more fascinating facts about echidnas:

1. Echidnas are named after a creature in Greek mythology, who was half woman, half snake, probably because they have both mammalian and reptilian characteristics.
2. Their sticky tongues can be almost seven inches long.
3. They are the most widespread of Australia’s native mammals and can live anywhere from snowy mountains to deserts.
4. In colder areas, they will hibernate, waking every 2 to 3 weeks.
5. While their lifespan in the wild is about 15 years, echidnas can live up to 50 years in captivity.

So while I very seldom see one of these alien-looking animals, I know they’re in the neighborhood not too far away, munching on ants and other insects every night. 

The power of water does weird and wonderful things to the southern coast of Tasmania. Strong winds from the southwest create pounding waves that attack the rockface and erode the coastline. In addition to the Tesselated Pavement, three other sites on the Tasman Peninsula illustrate the remarkable power of water: The Blowhole, Tasman Arch, and Devils Kitchen.

Before looking at The Blowhole, here’s a primer on how water forms caves. Imagine the sea as it crashes against the base of cliffs. The waves carry sand and rock debris, which act like a big horizontal piece of sandpaper, cutting a notch into the vertical rockface until a crack or joint is reached. Compressed water and air wedge in the crack, forcing the rock apart. Continued erosion makes a cave longer and wider.

The Blowhole was a sea cave and tunnel until the roof at the back of the tunnel collapsed. The result was a broad arch with a blowhole behind it.

Eventually, the water will cause the rest of the arch to collapse as well so that it looks more like the next formation.

Devils Kitchen was likely a sea cave and then a tunnel. The waves over many thousands of years have eroded the rock, causing the roof to completely collapse. The water follows its inexorable path, cracking joints to create new caves in the rockface.

The Kemal Ataturk Memorial recalls the heroism and sacrifices made by soldiers on both sides. Rather than demeaning adversaries or seeing them somehow as less than human, it asks us to instead acknowledge our shared humanity—a worthwhile thing to do on ANZAC day.

Unfortunately, the massive undertaking was a failure from the start. Even during construction, rabbits hopped around the fence, moving ever farther west. While the rabbit-proof fence may have been ineffective at stopping rabbits, it did serve as a landmark for three girls trying to find their way home.

The Aborigines Act of 1905 allowed the Australian government to forcibly remove indigenous children from their families and resettle them to assimilate into white culture. These children became known as the stolen generations. In 1931, Dolly and her younger cousins Gracie and Daisy lived in Jigalong, a settlement that had been established to maintain the rabbit-proof fence. The three girls had white fathers, and the government’s removal policy focused on "helping" those that were part-white by moving them away to  assimilate quicker. The three girls were torn from their families and moved to Moore River Native Settlement, around 1000 miles away from Jigalong. Dolly soon decided to escape, trusting in her bushcraft and ability to follow the fence to lead her and her cousins back home.

Author Doris Pilkington Garimara recounts the story of her mother Dolly’s epic trek in the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. The book was later made into an award-winning 2002 movie by Phillip Noyce.

In the recent Inked exhibition at the National Library of Australia, I discovered the weird and wonderful work of Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig. Typically referred to as just “Leunig,” he was declared an Australian Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia in 1999.

Born in 1945, Leunig attended Melbourne’s Monash University and worked on the student paper. From there he moved to the new Nation Review, a satirical magazine that began publishing in 1972. When that magazine closed, he went to the Melbourne Age. For more than 40 years, his cartoons observed politics, culture, and the emotional life of Australia. His work appears in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Leunig collaborated with animators Andrew Horne and Deborah Szapiro to produce a series of short films based on his cartoons.

Leunig describes his approach to his work as “regressive, humorous, messy, mystical, primal, and vaudevillian.” The result—full of curly people and birds—is odd, whimsical, and always thought-provoking.

In societies where making sharp observations about one's leaders or protesting policies in writing landed you in trouble, in prison, or worse, cartoonists soon learned to express all that with images. The National Library of Australia's collection contains more than 14,000 editorial cartoons, and the best of them are on exhibit now. Running from 7 March to 21 July, the exhibition is called Inked: Australian Cartoons.  

As an American in Australia, it was a chance to learn more about a culture by understanding its cartoons. The exhibition includes cartoons that capture the beginnings of Australia at Botany Bay all the way up to those that comment on current events. Wandering through the galleries, I felt like an anthropologist happening upon dozens of tiny time capsules.

Early cartoons explored Great Britain's relationship with this exotic new land. In the cartoon on the left, British cartoonist John Boyne suggests in 1786 that the planned penal colony would be a fitting home for the Prince of Wales. Notice that the prince wears a jester’s cap and sits on a barrel of tokay, a sweet fortified wine. His mistress and two moneylenders bid him farewell. In one image, Boyne suggests the prince’s crimes: drunkenness and promiscuity with both women and money. In a later cartoon from 1868, William Wyatt memorializes the arrival of an important visitor to Australia. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was the first member of the royal family to visit. A bevy of exotic animals greet him, including a kangaroo, wombat, wallaby, and an emu. The British Lion stands behind the prince.

After Federation on 1 January 1901, with a new constitution and federal government, the young nation struggled to establish its identity on the world stage. During the World Wars, the new country identified with the image that was developing of the Australian soldier: brave, practical, down to earth, and suspicious of authority. 

In the second row above, cartoons comment on our obsession with technology, approaches to global warming, and the referendum on same sex marriage. Cartoonist David Pope found signs of life and optimism when Australia voted "yes" for same sex marriage late in 2017.

The exhibition was eye-opening. I could definitely do worse than studying cartoons to try to understand a country and its culture.

Before moving to Australia, I visited the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. I marvelled at the captive rainbow lorikeets, thrilled that I would soon be seeing them in the wild. When I arrived in Canberra, I shared my neighborhood with many colorful, interesting birds, but no rainbow lorikeets. Only when traveling to Sydney, Queensland, or South Australia did I spot them. Then, a few days ago, I saw three rainbow lorikeets in my community. Over the last 18 months, my feelings about these birds have changed. I looked at them now with something approaching dread.

The natural range of rainbow lorikeets is broad, including the northern coasts of Australia, parts of eastern Australia and South Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Timor-Leste, and Indonesia. They have been introduced to Perth, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, and a few vagrants have found their way to Tasmania.

As cities and suburbs grow, bird populations have winners and losers. Some birds struggle with habitat loss, while others adapt readily to urban development and a year-round food supply from suburban gardens. Rainbow lorikeets are one of the big winners. Loud, aggressive, and traveling together in large flocks, they compete for available food and nesting trees, driving out local birds. They are prodigious breeders, producing up to three broods a season. Efficient eaters, their tongues are like bristle brushes, well adapted to reach deep within native flowers to extract their preferred food: nectar and pollen. They also eat insects and seeds and they LOVE fruit. And therein lies a problem.

The rainbow lorikeet is a menace to fruit. In Perth’s suburbs in Western Australia, lorikeets feed on figs, pears, apricots, nectarines, loquats, mulberries, mangoes, passionfruit, cherries, apples, peaches, plums, and guavas. In commercial fruit-growing areas, they have decimated table grapes and a range of other fruits. The bird is considered either an agricultural pest or an unwanted organism in New Zealand, Western Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania.
 
New Zealand’s problems with lorikeets began in Auckland in the 1990s when a few dozen birds were deliberately (and illegally) released into the wild. Ten years later, the population had grown to 200 birds. They were successfully removed, mainly by live capture, by 2002.  
 
Tasmania is especially concerned by new sightings and the risk to its fruit-growing industry. Rainbow lorikeets also pose a threat to native Tasmanian parrots as they compete for food and resources. The birds carry Psittacine beak and feather disease, further threatening native parrots. The Tasmanian Government noted the cautionary example of Western Australia. Fewer than 10 rainbow lorikeets had been introduced in the 1960s. By 2006, the population was estimated to be as many as 20,000 birds. Seeking to avoid Western Australia’s fate, Tasmania is considering eradication measures to keep rainbow lorikeets from getting fully established.

What do rainbow lorikeets mean for Canberra?  The Canberra Ornithologists Group observed that the resident population of rainbow lorikeets is gradually spreading south. Reported sightings climbed to 7.6%, which is 17% higher than last year and three times the 30-year average. Naturalist Ian Fraser commented in an article that the numbers of rainbow lorikeets (along with another parrot, the little corella) are steadily increasing: "Most people don't notice it yet, they're still relatively restricted, but they're starting to breed in the nature reserves. They're going to be all over Canberra in the next couple of decades I think."

Birders have begun observing the pressure on local birds. The photo below shows a lorikeet driving away a pair of eastern rosellas from their nesting hollow.

The photo was posted to Canberra Nature Map, and a commenter expressed concern for rosellas and other local birds, considering the dramatic growth of the rainbow lorikeet population in recent years.

I imagine my neighbor’s small fruit orchard will suffer along with the local birds. And did I mention how noisy rainbow lorikeets are? While feeding flocks are generally fewer than 50 birds, they can contain more than 1,000. Here’s what a flock of 30 sounds like. Now imagine hundreds in a swarm.

Hard to believe these active, beautiful birds can cause so many problems. Orchard destroyers, disease carriers, threat to local birds, and noisy as well. This is one new bird that I'm not excited about welcoming to the neighborhood.

For nine days in March, Canberra holds an annual hot air balloon festival. Balloons come from all over Australia and around the world. They launch from the lawns of Old Parliament House and drift over the lake and city. What started as a one-time event in 1988 has grown to be one of the world’s biggest and longest-running hot air balloon festivals.

More than 30 balloons launch daily if conditions are right. The weather has to be calm, but not too calm, or the balloons won’t have enough lift to launch. Because the weather is often calmest early in the morning, we waited out in the cold, just before dawn, for the announcement. At 6:15am, the word came that, yes, they would fly.

The balloons are brought in by cars and trucks. The first step is to get the basket out and attach the burner system. Next, the balloon is attached to the basket and spread out on the ground. Thousands of square meters of material make up a balloon. It has to be big and strong enough to carry the pilots, any passengers, and the basket.

The crew uses a powerful fan to begin inflating the balloon. Once there’s enough air, the burner flame heats that air, building pressure.

The crew continues to heat the air until the balloon comes up off the ground. A balloon can stand about as tall as a five-story building, while the air inside can weigh up to 20 tons. Once the balloon is up, the crew gets on board. When everything is ready, the ground crew releases the balloon, and the pilot sends up a steady flame into the balloon to keep the air hot. Up it goes!