​On my very first day in Australia, I spotted these odd pink and gray birds. They strolled along in a side-to-side gait that wasn’t quite a waddle, often in twos, feeding from the ground. They were far from graceful—until they took to the air. These mystery birds turned out to be strong, swift flyers.
 
The birds were galahs, a type of cockatoo, and I’ve seen them nearly every day since. Galahs are one of Australia’s most common birds. The name “galah” comes from the indigenous Yuwaalaraay language of northern New South Wales. The word has also become Australian slang for a fool or idiot, perhaps because Australians have perceived the bird as a clown or not particularly smart.  
 
The indigenous peoples of Australia had different stories about how the galah got its distinctive appearance. One version said the bald spot beneath the bird’s crest was caused by a lizard’s carelessness. Another story attributed the galah’s pink breast to blood lost in a battle, while in another, the galah becomes pink and gray after trying to help a dove ease the pain of a festering foot.
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Here are some facts about galahs:

While galahs don’t have the raucous confidence of sulphur-crested cockatoos or the cheekiness of gang-gangs, they always strike me as dignified, with a fussy charm all their own. 

​Everyone in North America is familiar with opossums. The only marsupial in the United States and Canada, the opossum eats many harmful insects, including more than 5,000 ticks in a season. 

​The name came from the Algonquin word “aposoum,” meaning a white dog or white beast. The informal name for this animal is “possum.”

We have very different possums here. They live in New Guinea, Australia, and Indonesia. These possums received their name because English naturalist Sir Joseph Banks thought they looked like the North American opossum.  

Both Australian possums and North American possums are marsupials, nocturnal, omnivorous, and live in trees. Both play dead (playing possum) when they’re threatened.

Now for the differences. They belong to different orders: Didelphimorphia for opossum and Diprotodontia for the possum. While the opossum has coarse hair and a hairless tail (like a rat), possums have softer hair and long bushy tails. Possums come in more diverse colors, and they have a rank smell because of musk glands behind their ears.

Other facts about possums include:

While someone from North American would understand a reference to either an opossum or possum, an Australian would probably think I was talking funny if I added an “o” to one of their possums.

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.

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.

Yarralumla is a southern suburb of Canberra, located around 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) away from the city. Although the formal suburb was established in 1928, the land has been known as Yarralumla for a much longer time, at least since 1834, when the area owned by Sydney merchant Henry Donnison was given the name in a land survey. The word “Yarralumla” comes from an aboriginal word meaning “echo.”

The streets in Yarralumla have the names of governors and botanists, such as Hopetoun Circuit, named for Australia’s first governor-general, and McGillivray Street, named for botanist Donald McGillivray.

Yarralumla stretches along the southwest bank of Lake Burley Griffin. The lake was created in the early 1960s by blocking the Molonglo River with a dam. Many Canberrans are drawn to the lake, to enjoy the outdoors and have some fun. On a recent visit, I was struck by the sunny yellows all around me.

Like the Canberra suburb of O’Malley, Yarralumla is home to more than 30 embassies and high commissions. Eight of the countries represented in Yarralumla feature yellow in their flags.   

We live in O’Malley, a suburb about eight miles south from the center of Canberra. Established in 1973, O’Malley is in the Woden Valley. The suburb was named after King O’Malley, a politician best known for arranging the competition  to design the new capital city of Canberra.

O’Malley is home to around 20 embassies and high commissions. All the streets include aboriginal words, such as Callemonda Rise and Timbarra Crescent.

Because of the two nature reserves here (Mount Mugga Mugga and Issacs Ridge), many trails lead into the bush. Kangaroos and cockatoos are common sights, framed against the blue sky, green grasses (this time of year), and the varied tans of the dusty trails. What I didn’t expect to see when I moved to O’Malley was orange … and a lot of it.

Wildflowers thrive at the edge of the trails.

The color orange appears in some unexpected places in nature.

Building materials match the surroundings.

For one day at least, both Milo and I were orange too, although he's really more of a light apricot.

And we can always count on shades of orange in our sunsets.