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Peter Menkhorst
Peter Menkhorst is a zoologist with the Victorian Government’s Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research where he works on a broad range of fauna conservation issues. He has produced field guides to both the mammals and the birds of Australia, most recently The Australian Bird Guide (CSIRO Publishing, 2017).
Australia’s wild dog, the dingo, probably generates the most diverse human responses of any of our fauna – from a determination to exterminate to passionate conservation advocacy. This book is a bold attempt to cover this diversity and asserts that the dingo is a unique wild animal worthy of conservation for its intrinsic value, as well as for its critical role in ecological function and stabi ... (read more)
The white explorers who first penetrated the interior of this continent were exceptional men. White Australians of the time considered them heroes, performing an essential role in identifying opportunities for exploitation, settlement, and commerce. Mostly, the explorers were heroic – determined, tough, single-minded, and stoic in the face of enormous hardship. They also needed bushcraft, that e ... (read more)
Australia’s birds stand out from the global avian pack in many ways – ecologically, behaviourally, because some ancient lineages survive here, and because many species are endemic. The ancestors of more than half of the planet’s ten thousand bird species (the songbirds) evolved right here (eastern Gondwana) before spreading across the world. Indeed, Tim Low claims in this important and illum ... (read more)
Errol Fuller has played a key role in documenting historical extinctions of birds, notably the Great Auk and the Dodo. In the course of this work he has accumulated a fascinating collection of photographs of now extinct animals, many of them unique and not previously published.
... (read more)
Curious Minds sets out to explore the naturalists and scientists who brought Australia’s flora and fauna into the public consciousness: on the face of it a laudable aim, but one not totally fulfilled. From the title onwards the book seems confused in its aims and in its style. Is the book intended to be about people (the curious naturalists), flora and fauna (their discoveries), or both? Does it ... (read more)
Why would a famous virologist and immunologist (and Nobel laureate) write a book linking birds, human diseases, and ecological degradation? The answer is partly that Peter Doherty obviously has a soft spot for birds and birdwatching. He argues that anyone with an enquiring mind and a natural history bent cannot fail to notice birds and to be intrigued by them. But the full answer is that Doherty i ... (read more)
In this age of throwaway digital images it is easy to forget that before the late nineteenth century the only means of conveying a visual image of an object or place was by drawing its likeness. For this reason, well-funded exploratory expeditions often included an artist whose role was to illustrate new and interesting people, landscapes, geological features, animals and plants. Australian exampl ... (read more)
When the first specimen of the Platypus reached Europe in 1798, it was received with incredulity by zoologists. With anatomical and morphological characteristics seemingly belonging to reptiles, birds, and mammals, it simply did not fit into the existing classifications. Further, it appeared to lack mammary glands and therefore could not be classed as a mammal, yet it had obvious mammalian charact ... (read more)