Mini-guana

This is what the young of our super-endangered, endemic iguana, Cyclura pinguis look like......

Pretty little chevroned chaps and chappesses with snubnoses and delicate patterning all over.

Rather different to the big, dark grey dragons they grow up into eh? Just after I took this photo something very cool happened which I'll show you next week.

IVAD09 - Condors on my mind

This post is in respect of International Vulture Awareness Day.......

"There appears to have been a recent death," the man murmured nodding towards the heavy birds, which hopped about, utterly fearless.
"How so?" asked the second traveller.
"When a monk dies, his body is butchered and thrown to the wild animals. It is considered the highest honour to have your mortal remains nourish and sustain other living things."
"A peculiar custom."
'On the contrary, the logic is impeccable. Our customs are peculiar,"

Preston/Child - The Wheel of Darkness

I've often thought, upon seeing a vulture, that perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad way to have one's self disposed of, though now it is hard in most places where this tradition has developed to find enough vultures to do the job. Vultures fascinate me; both in and of themselves and as representatives of wilderness. A land with vultures is a land untamed enough to contain large, unsanitised amounts of death and hence similar amounts of life. Last year, I went on a pilgrimage of sorts to the west coast of north america to search for giants. Giant trees, great whales and giant sharks. There was one more giant I sought. A restored relic; the Californian Condor.

Seeing them is pretty easy. At any one time several can be found at San Diego Wild Animal Parks "Condorminium" (yes, yes I know). Now normally captive birds wouldn't float my boat but these are rather special. At one time all California condors were captive birds, taken from the wild in a last gasp effort to save the species that thankfully was successful. As such a visit to one of the institutions that was instrumental in their survival seemed appropriate, even necessary, before heading off to quest for them in their wild and it was there that the photos accompanying this post were taken.

The condors' decline was hastened in the 19th century by lead bullets, both those aimed at them and those eaten by them, and by habitat destruction and disturbance but it began long before. In the late Pleistocene Huge California condors soared across much of North America's skies alongside an even bigger scavenger; Merriam's Teratorn (Teratornis merriami). As the megafaunal corpses below them subsided so to did the teratorns and condors. Teratornis fell to extinction where the condors retreated to the Pacific coast where they could continue to feast on the one group of large mammals that remained; the beached corpses of whales, dolphins and seals.

In time, even the mighty Pacific's whales and seals began to fall to man's greed and the Condor's lost yet another food source. At the same time those that headed to farm lands were relentlessly persecuted and the end seemed nigh......and yet somehow, with our help, they endured. I could go into detail about the rescue effort but I won't; the best way to learn about it is to read John Moir's Return of the Condor which covers that long, winding road through ingenuity and politics, joy and despair, perfectly. It was that road that eventually led me to Big Sur, California in 2008 to search for condors above the mist-draped redwoods.

As we drove deeper into Big Sur, a pair of huge black shapes floated over a ridge and we halted the car in a desperate screech. Struggling to pick out any detail beyond their size at distance I convinced myself I was looking at a pair of California Condors and was absolutely elated. As the birds drifted slightly closer nagging doubts set in. Closer still I confirmed the doubts were right; I'd strung myself into misidentifying a pair of turkey vultures.....and yet strangely I didn't seem to care. I was still elated and after a while I realised something, my joy wasn't due to seeing condors, my joy was due to there still being a chance of seeing condors drifting through California's skies at all.

Soaring something.

International Vulture Awareness Day is tomorrow and I've put a post together for that but in the meantime....anyone want to take a stab at what this is?

Taken in Venezuela's Gran Sabanna

The Daintree Giant

The Daintree rainforest of north Queensland, Australia is a primordial place populated by huge flightless helmeted birds (cassowaries) and primitive mammals like tree kangaroos. As such it is the perfect location for a population of huge, ancient cycads. These are Lepidozamia hopei, the tallest of all cycads with many ancient individuals putting on trunks over 20 metres high.

The specimen below will not do that - some past trauma has produced a double headed plant which will forever have a weakness where the trunks split.

This is in all respects a big plant and its interesting to note that its seeds, though toxic, were used by aboriginal peoples for food having been treated by a lengthy process. Some of the biggest wild plants are marked by foot and holds hacked into the trunks to allow people to climb to the head of the plant and collect seed cones for food.

This plant is a female and you can see the female cone emerging at the top. As this is a cultivated plant in a botanical garden with one of the world's best cycad collections, this cone's seeds are destined for cultivation not the dinner table; L. hopei is less common in gardens than its sister species L. perrofskyana but this is changing.

In about a years time there should be a few more too.

Wordless Wednesday: Leviathon

You shouldn't be here.....

So there has been a lot of focus recently on exotic reptiles invading FC's home state of Florida recently. The bulk of this attention, for obvious reasons, is going to the Burmese Pythons currently spreading through the Everglades like wildfire - I went looking for these by the way, the results will feature soonish - and to a lesser extent to Nile Monitor lizards, both large, potentially ecologically disastrous species. They are however the tip of the iceberg. For herpers, Florida is a huge open air zoo. Depending upon where you go there are small populations (often confined by urban areas) of all sorts of critters from big species like Boa constrictor, Green and spiny iguanas to little critters like madagascan giant day geckos or south east asia's tokay geckos. Spectacled caiman have even been suggested to be a breeding species! One introduced Florida herp is very easy to find due to its extremely restricted range and, since it was somewhere I was going already, I had to look it up.

This is the Red-headed Rock Agama - Agama agama africana and as that subspecific name suggests it is of african origin. It's also awesome looking hence its presents in the States where five or so populations exist thanks to careless and/or idiotic reptile dealers. The most famous of these inhabits the rock garden of Fairchild Tropical Garden.

In creating a garden based on shale, sand, gravel and big rocks Fairchild have produced a perfect little spot for a population of these guys and they do very well here. The population seems to not have spread particularly far and is centred around the rock pile where brightly coloured males bob their displays of dominance at one another and females lunge for small insects among rare succulents and cacti.

If you want to see this species in Florida looking around the rock pile should be a locked on cert. Otherwise its to sub-saharan Africa for you.