Meanwhile in Australia...

[raif71]

All of this reminds me of the movie Crocodile Dundee
Could just imagine a dialogue between a city dweller with Mr Dundee about the frogs on top of the snake...

City Dweller : Nice of the snake to help the frogs run away from the storm eh, Mr Dundee
Croc. Dundee : Nahh...the snake is just packing its food to bring to its new home

 

[GrimSurfer]

That was filmed in Kakadu National Forest (I hope I got that right), near Jabiru, in the Northern Territory. Amazing place. Utterly amazing.

I knew we were going feral one day on the NSW coast. My wife was stopped from entering the beachfront ladies room by a couple of 20-something Scottish girls. They told her not to go in. Apparently there was a "really big lizard in there".

My wife checked it out and said "it's just a goanna" and didn't give it a second thought.

But it's not just tourists. A friend of mine who was a reporter for a Brisbane TV station told me about her station would send the cub reporters to cover the annual burn off of the sugar cane. The rookies would look curiously as the cameraman set up his rig in the back of the ute.

Filming stars when the cane is torched.

The first thing to run from the flames are the rats, followed by tiger snakes and king browns. The reporter, whose back is to the flames, doesn't see this until it is too late. Laughs all around. After that, a good reporter starts asking more penetrating questions of the cameramen.

 

[restorer-john]

I read somewhere that the Australian magpie has the most musically diverse call of any bird. After listening to them, and other Australian birds such as the kookaburra, I started to think about why this might be.

Drawing from some experience with high frequency automatic link establishment (ALE) radios, I believe the diversity and frequency agility of Australian birds is an evolutionary trait to ensure parts of the call can punch-out over the din of the bush. Rustling dry leaves, the roar of cicadas etc. can be almost deafening at times. Since it's impossible for a small bird to compete on a sound pressure level, the only alternative is to cleverly use the frequency spectrum to get warning and mating calls out.

The aboriginals seem to have adopted the same approach with the bullroarer, which uses frequency modulation as a way of generating sound above the din of the bush.

I have no idea if this is true... it was just a thought that came to me during my many bush walks in a country of unparalleled beauty.

There's no doubt the various birds use parts of the frequency spectrum that suit their environment and the topology of the land. Magpies have phenomenally complex arrays of calls that can cut through just about any noise. Being as they've adapted to all parts of the country, including heavily populated, industrial and cities, as well as their traditional bush and country, I wonder if their calls have changed and adapted as well over the last several hundred years since humans arrived (en-masse)

We just had the early morning cacophony that is the local avian orchestra- kookaburras, magpies, rainbow lorikeets, black cocaktoos, some random crows and one particularly melodic local bird I don't know the name of.

 

[Touchstone]

I read somewhere that the Australian magpie has the most musically diverse call of any bird

This is true. There's a woman at New England University whose name I've forgotten but who's been working on magpie song for years. She's concluded that they're the best mimics of all Australian birds (even better than the lyre bird) and that, at the end of each day, they fabricate a new song with notes appropriated from everything they've heard during the day.

 

[001]

It's the infamous thread necromancer: no one has mentioned blue bottles, both the ant and the jellyfish. Fortunately there's not heaps of them at any one time.

it's a wasp actually and eats mole crickets.

I've seen enough of them around where I live [great ocean road]

 

[Deleted member 23424]

There's no doubt the various birds use parts of the frequency spectrum that suit their environment and the topology of the land. Magpies have phenomenally complex arrays of calls that can cut through just about any noise. Being as they've adapted to all parts of the country, including heavily populated, industrial and cities, as well as their traditional bush and country, I wonder if their calls have changed and adapted as well over the last several hundred years since humans arrived (en-masse)

We just had the early morning cacophony that is the local avian orchestra- kookaburras, magpies, rainbow lorikeets, black cocaktoos, some random crows and one particularly melodic local bird I don't know the name of.

I've seen the little Wren being described as the loudest bird in the UK. For reference its smaller than a ping-pong ball. They've adapted to live in human created environments now but were once most common among waterways and on coasts and their vocal frequency optimised to carry above the considerable background noise.