Every year in the spring, Australians celebrate National Bird Week by taking part in a huge citizen science project. For one week in October, Australians count the birds they see in their backyards, parks, and open spaces across the country.
​
I participated this year in the sixth annual Aussie Backyard Bird Count, submitting checklists via a phone app of the birds I saw in 20-minute increments from stationary locations.  

I was not alone: More than 88,000 people participated, with the numbers of schools that took part growing to more than 1,000 this year.
​
The results are in, and a total of 3,381 768 birds were counted. The graphic below summarizes the results and lists the birds most commonly seen in Australia 

The rainbow lorikeet took the top spot for the second year in a row, which I found troubling for several reasons, but that bird is nothing if not tenacious and adaptable.

The data is important because it’s a snapshot of yearly trends affecting the environment. Birds give an early indication when something’s wrong—think of canaries in a coal mine.

This year, a new bird reached the top ten most commonly seen species: the white ibis. The white ibis is a dry country bird, and thousands more were spotted in wetter urban areas near the coast. The data indicates that the continued drought continues to affect birds like the ibis, and they are adapting by moving to areas they aren’t normally found.
​
I’m glad I did my small part in this massive citizen science project that contributes more to what we know about Australia’s birds.

On morning walks, I often wonder what the world looks like to our dog Milo. Many experts on canines, including Alexandra Horowitz, recommend taking a walk in your dog’s footsteps and imagining what he sees, smells, and experiences. I call these stop-and-sniff walks, and I’ve started doing them whenever I have enough time in the morning to let Milo set the pace.

I have some ground rules: no more than one hour spent outside, and I follow Milo’s lead—within reason. That means no unsafe terrain where snakes might lurk (rock piles, tall grass) and no trespassing on someone’s private property. Here’s what I’ve learned from our stop-and-sniff walks.

We amble, we circle, we meander. We are almost never on a path, or at least, not a path that I recognize. I believe these twisty, turning trails follow the rabbits and kangaroos.

We never wander all that far. Most of the time, we’re no more than two-tenths of a mile from home. Who knew that Milo, like Thoreau, believes in the value of discovering all the possibilities of a single patch of ground rather than exploring the entire world?

That patch contains multitudes. When I looked at the ground rather than up at the sky, I saw all kinds of fascinating things. ​

Rather than approaching kangaroos gradually from a distance, we happen on them unexpectedly, in the cool shadows of trees. 

​On these walks, I learned to look down and appreciate what I saw. I learned to use my ears and my nose, not just my eyes. I learned to cultivate patience. After all, there’s always time to chew a stick.

I knew how valuable these stop-and-sniff walks would be for Milo, but what I didn’t know was how good they would be for me too.

When visiting Glasgow recently, as I wrote last week, I found an unexpected connection to Australia. During the same visit, as I walked away from the Glasgow Cathedral, I found another. 

This giant mural was painted by Australian artist Sam Bates, also known as Smug. Born in the small town of Nowra, New South Wales (about three hours south of Sydney), he has lived and worked in Glasgow for 16 years.
​
The mural is beloved to Glaswegians and depicts a modern-day representation of Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. The birds in the mural symbolize the story of the Bird that Never Flew, one of St. Mungo’s miracles. The nearby Glasgow Cathedral is the final resting place of St. Mungo.

As a follow up to St. Mungo, Smug painted another mural at the corner of High Street and George Street. Here, St. Mungo is breastfed by his mother St. Enoch. Again, a bird appears in the mural.   

Smug has painted several other murals in Glasgow, and his work is known for both its photorealism and gentle humor.
​
I happened upon this mural by Smug, which was commissioned for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. Tucked beneath the Kingston Bridge, the swimmers look as if they’re competing in the chilly River Clyde. 

The mural below remembers that people are not the only residents of Glasgow. These animals can be found in Glasgow’s parks and green spaces.

​Near Central Station is this mural of a girl with a magnifying glass. Towering above pedestrians, it looks as if she’s ready to pick up something or someone. 

This video excerpt from a Rick Steves’ episode about Glasgow includes one theory about this mural along with a look at street art by Smug and other artists.  

Finding signs of Australia in Glasgow reminded me that the world is interconnected and sometimes it feels like a smaller, cozier place.

​When I travel overseas, I look for connections to Australia. Often I find them in unexpected places. On a recent visit to Glasgow, I saw this exhibit in the Riverside Museum.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, transportation for life was a common punishment for Glaswegians who broke the law. Until 1867, they were transported to America, Africa, and in the later part of that period, to Australia.

In the 19th century, Australian authorities asked for 1500 female convicts to be sent from Glasgow to North South Wales to increase the population of women there. The convicts could bring their young children with them. And with that, the story ended in Scotland.

When I returned to Australia, I discovered that Scottish women made up a very small percentage of the convicts transported; most came from England and Wales, and especially Ireland. The women arrived on transports ships like the Mellish, pictured above. Many would end up in the Parramatta Female Factory, which was modeled on the workhouses of England.

Travel not only broadens my mind but also increases the number of connections I can make between pockets of forgotten history around the world.

The Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, was a large carnivorous marsupial that carried its young in a pouch. Fossils and cave paintings show that it once lived all over Australia. Thylacines didn’t survive on the mainland, dying out about 3,000 years ago. Scientists speculate that pressure from dingos, a type of wild dog, may have been a factor, along with a dryer climate and less vegetation. By the time Europeans arrived in Australia, thylacines were found only on the island of Tasmania, where they lived in the eucalypt forests and coastal lands. Early settlers called them Tasmanian tigers because of their dark stripes. Thylacines hunted at night and ate possums, other marsupials, rodents, and small birds.

In 1863, naturalist John Gould predicted that more people and more development would be the end of the Tasmanian tiger. He was right.

Settlers targeted the animal, believing that thylacines killed sheep. The Tasmanian Government paid a bounty on every thylacine killed between 1830 and 1909. More than 2,000 were slaughtered, and the species never recovered. 

What thylacines remained were kept in captivity, and the last one died in 1936 at a zoo in Hobart. In the wild, the animal was officially designated extinct in 1986 after years of fruitless searches.

​This display at the National Museum of Australia, and others like it, are most likely all that's left of the Tasmanian tiger. 

That dismal thought doesn't stop people from trying to find them though. In Tasmania, there are still eight to ten sightings reported every year, but no convincing proof. And if Tasmanian tigers can't be found, maybe they can be brought back to life. Progress has been made in attempts to clone the thylacine.
​
As I walked away from the thylacine exhibit, I hoped it wasn’t a portent for the future. Australia leads the world in extinction rates, with 29 species lost since colonial times. I wonder what the chances are that one or more of the animals I see every day will end up in a display like this.

Recently I saw the exhibition Storytime: Australian Children’s Literature, which runs until February 2020 at the National Library of Australia. It traces the development of children’s literature from colonial days to the present and includes everything from picture books for small children to novels aimed at young adults. For many native Australians, this would be a nostalgic journey, reminding them of many old favorites from childhood. For me it was an odyssey through a whole new landscape—a chance to learn more about Australia’s culture by exploring what stories authors have chosen to tell children.    
​
No surprise, I gravitated to the stories featuring iconic animals like kangaroos, possums, koalas, and wombats. Women have written many of these books, and the work of three authors resonated with me.

The earliest work, written by Ethel C. Pedley and published in 1899, is called Dot and the Kangaroo. A kangaroo comes to help Dot, a young girl who’s lost in the bush. After eating berries that the kangaroo offers her, Dot can understand the animals around her.  The other bush animals help the kangaroo and Dot to find her way home. The book was made into an award-winning film in 1977 and eight more movies were made about Dot. Both the book and the movies include the idea that humans have had a terrible effect on the lives of native animals.

Mem Fox focused on possums, and in 1983, finally published Possum Magic. She started writing an early draft in 1978, and like Jackie French later, the book was rejected many times. The possum protagonist is Hush, whose grandma made her invisible to keep her safe. The problem is, Grandma has forgotten how to reverse the spell, but she knows it has something to do with food. The pair leave the bush to journey across Australia, trying traditional Australian foods along the way to find out which ones will make Hush visible again. This story, a popular favorite for Scholastic Books, has never been out of print since it was published and was turned into a musical. 

Five years later, in 1988, Mem Fox wrote Koala Lou, when Australian singer Olivia Newton-John asked her to write a book about a koala named Blue. That idea led to Koala Lou, a determined little koala who enters the Bush Olympics to get her mother’s affection and approval.

​Jackie French has written more than 140 books. Her breakthrough picture book, Diary of a Wombat, published in 2002, features a lively, demanding wombat named Mothball. The book is in the form of Mothball’s diary entries for a week as she tries to coexist with her new human neighbors. She soon learns how to train them to give her carrots, her favorite treat. With charming illustrations and Mothball’s deadpan delivery, this picture book is laugh-out-loud funny.  
​
After seeing this exhibition, I not only feel like I learned a lot about Australian culture through its children’s literature, but I also made some new literary friends along the way.

When I first arrived in Australia, I saw this animal in a nature reserve. 

Ah, I thought—a kangaroo. Nope. I found out it was actually a wallaby, and many newcomers have a hard time identifying them.

To be fair, kangaroos and wallabies are similar. They both belong to the family Macropodinae (named for their characteristic big feet). Both are marsupials. Like kangaroos, wallaby mothers have short pregnancies. When the babies are born, they climb into the mother’s pouch and attach to a nipple until they finish developing.

Also like kangaroos, wallabies are herbivores that are most active at dawn and dusk.

Now for the differences: wallabies are smaller, typically the size of a medium dog. Depending on the type of wallaby, they can weigh anywhere from 4 to 53 pounds.

The teeth of a wallaby are different as well. A kangaroo’s teeth are designed for cutting through tall grass. A wallaby has a much wider diet, browsing on both shrubs and grasses. Its teeth are made more for crunching and grinding.

Here are five fast facts about wallabies:

​As I discovered, wallabies are not miniature kangaroos. At least now when I stumble upon them on one of my walks, I know how to greet them properly.

Some of the world’s oldest trees stand on a hillside in the National Arboretum in Canberra, overlooking mountains and the lake below.

These trees are called Wollemi pines, and a long time ago, they were all over Australia. Fossil evidence reveals that they go back 100 million to 200 million years. Dinosaur fossils have been found in Australia from around that same time, leading paleontologists to believe that some dinosaurs may have eaten Wollemi leaves. As the continent became dryer, the trees died out; they were thought to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs.

But then in 1994, a national park worker discovered a small stand of Wollemi pine in a rain forest gorge in the Blue Mountains, not far from Sydney. A massive conservation effort began, with seedlings sent around the world. Some ended up in Canberra.

Despite the tiny population in the wild, the tree is hearty. It can grow on exposed rock slopes and withstand temperatures ranging from 23 degrees Fahrenheit to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. The seedlings have matured, producing viable seeds of their own. Some Wollemi pines produce female cones, while others produce male cones, and some trees produce both.

People across the world can order a prehistoric pine of their own, to help this ancient tree survive. 

On this anniversary of 9/11, a friend and I found ourselves on a hill to the north of Canberra. Walking through the National Arboretum, we listened to a guide talk about the 94 forests of different trees planted at the Arboretum.

Our guide stopped in front of a modest tree, called a Chanticleer Callery pear. 

This pear tree, he told the group, had been planted in 2011. The U.S. Ambassador at that time, Mr. Jeffrey Bleich, had planted the tree to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

This type of pear tree, our guide continued, has a history. In October 2001, 9/11 rescue workers at Ground Zero found a Chanticleer Callery pear tree under the ruins. Its trunk blackened, its roots and limbs snapped, the tree was alive, just barely. It was nursed back to health and later replanted in 2010 in the National September 11 Memorial, where it became known as the Survivor Tree. That tree, the guide concluded, and the one planted here in Canberra to commemorate that awful day are both symbols of hope.

My friend and I hadn’t spoken during the tour; no one knew we were Americans. And yet the guide had told the story thoughtfully, and the Australians had listened with respect and sympathy. What could have been a moment of alienation and separation, of feeling so far from home, was instead intensely moving because of the kindness and empathy of the people around us. Thank you, Australia.

How citizens go about protests can tell you a lot about their country. In an exhibit called Activism: Forces for Change in Canberra at the Canberra Museum + Gallery, I saw this:

It’s a float called Stop Arms for Export. Handmade from oil drums and metal swimming pool walls re-purposed from a dump, the float is 7 meters long (about 23 feet). It was used to protest defense companies coming to Canberra to show off their wares to the Australian Government in the Australian International Defence Exhibitions (AIDEX) of 1989 and 1991.

The 1991 exhibition drew around 2,000 protesters, leading to more than 200 arrests. As part of these protests, nine naked men hid inside the arm of the float. The plan was to rush the exhibition center’s main gate, and then the men (calling themselves Penises for Peace) would jump out inside the exhibition.

The police foiled their plan, diverting the float and then overturning it. The men spilled out and were promptly arrested.

The protests, however, were effective. Because of the disruption and bad publicity, local and state authorities refused to allow a massive arms exhibition in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) ever again.

What did I learn about Australia from this local version of the Trojan horse? Its people will band together with their mates and find the quirky even in something they believe in passionately.