It looks as if, due to the extreme slowness of internet here, I won’t be able to put up my snaps of India until I return to Chicago. I’m sorry that I can’t document my travels as they occur, but promise to do so post mortem. Bear with me.
My cache of readers’ wildlife photos is back in Chicago, but we can have three today since stalwart Stephen Barnard in Idaho sent one picture of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):
. . . and reader Tim Anderson sent two photos. The first shows a weird Australian bird that, while out of focus, is presented because it includes a recipe:
The Scrub Turkey (Alectura lathami) is a megapode inhabiting Eastern Australian rainforests. It is protected. It builds a nest up to five metres across and a metre high. It will do so in your living room if you let it.
How To Cook A Scrub Turkey
Place scrub turkey in forty-four gallon drum
Place brick in drum with scrub turkey
Fill drum with water
Boil till brick is soft
Throw away scrub turkey
Eat brick
The second is a herp:
This elegant beasty is an adult Eastern Water Dragon (Intellagama lesueurii) out sunning itself in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. They grow up to a metre in length and are arboreal members of the agamid family of lizards.
Reblogged this on Shashank Patel.
Ah — loves me some scrub-turkey-flavored brick! The leftovers are great cold for breakfast.
b&
Great for de-scaling teeth, too..
Vegetarian brick eaters have no idea what they are missing.
😀
Nice photos!
Really like the complete sharpness of Stephen’s hawk!
Ah! Wildlife photos! My day is starting well.
I read about the water dragon to learn that it can swim under water, which is interesting.
The wiki article doesn’t do that beautiful animal justice.
Interesting recent news on brush turkeys. I think it’s great news that they are coming back to Sydney suburbs – maybe we have yet to see Malleefowl back in Perth or Adelaide? Considering that both species build nest-mounds up to at least 4 m across, and free-living cats and dogs are incompatible with their survival, you see it takes a certain sort of human being to make urban habitat safe for megapodes.
What a fascinating nesting/hatching method!
The recipe I heard used and anvil.
Gourmet opinion is divided on the brick versus anvil question. However, opinion is undivided on the inedibility of scrub turkeys.
How adaptive is that?! 😉
Yet they have often been eaten, e.g. during the 1930’s depression as mentioned in this article, when the largest ever number of Australians (post-1788) tried to live off the land while the money economy was having a lie-down.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/10547596_662443213874031_3177184391086633029_n.jpg?oh=b4138c05e25a21469a047e7c6b1c07e5&oe=552E24EB&__gda__=1429253459_8ca01a7685e96b4b117667920d8978c5
My daughter took this photo on a recent trip to Brisbane. This is within a few km of the centre of town.
Nice!