"Good night, and thanks for the tinamou..."

In 10 trips to South America I'd never managed to see a tinamou, to my chagrin. I'd heard them, and on one occasion the group just in front of me saw some walk across the track, but not me. It's possible I've even mentioned the fact to other travelling companions...

They really are a most interesting family of birds, close to the most ancient of living birds. Together with the ratites - the mostly large, flightless runners of the southern continents, emus, cassowaries, kiwis, rheas and ostriches (plus extinct moas and Madagascan elephant birds) - they comprise the grouping known as the Palaeognathae, 'ancient palates'. This refers to primitive palate characteristics which are more reminiscent of reptiles than other living birds. All other birds belong the 'other' grouping, the Neognathae. Some put the ratites and tinamous into separate orders, others insist they are all part of one order of very closely related birds.

A South American ratite; Darwins Rhea father and chicks, Torres del Paine NP, southern Chile.
Another reminder of the close relationship between rheas and tinamous is the breeding behaviour. Tinamou males call to attract females, one of whom mates with him and then leaves him with a clutch of eggs to brood on the ground,
while she goes off to find another male for another clutch. This is not identical to ratite breeding but is very similar.

The key difference between the two Palaeognathae groups is that the tinamous retain the keel on the breastbone, which is the anchor point for the great flight muscles, and can still fly, though reluctantly and inexpertly. It seems that the ratites broke away early from the tinamous and then diversified in the Gondwanan lands.

There are 47 tinamou species found throughout most of Central and South America, in pretty much every habitat type, but they are notoriously shy and skulking.

One night recently at Napo Lodge within the magnificent Yasuní National Park in the Amazon basin in Ecuador I was about to have a shower prior to collapsing for the night when a knock on the door was followed by "come quickly, I have something you want to see". It was Dani, the lodge-employed guide attached to our group, who had heard about my desire for tinamous from Marcelo, our own guide. He'd seen one roosting nearby a few days previously and had gone to see if it was still using the same site; it was...

With torches we descended into the rainforest on muddy tracks and after a few hundred metres, there it was above the track.

Great Tinamou Tinamus major.This  is a big bird, up to 45cm long and weighing well over a kilogram.
It has been heavily hunted and suffers from forest clearance, but is doing better than some other species.

We didn't stay long, not wanting to scare it off into the night, especially when dazzled by our torches. It was a very special moment for me and one I'll never forget, not only for the wonderful bird itself, but for the kindness of Dani and Marcelo. Of course I still want to see one on the ground in the daytime, but for now I'm very content.

And as a footnote, on the way back we saw another delight that I'd only read about, a beautiful coral snake. These are highly venomous, but small and not readily encountered.

Coral Snake, probably Micrurus sp., disappearing under a log.
There are some 20 species in Ecuador and I can't hazard a guess as to the species, but it capped a memorable night.

BACK ON MONDAY

The Mysterious Owl of San Isidro

Just back from another visit to wonderful Ecuador, it's perhaps inevitable that my first posting will relate to that. I'm easing myself back into life in Australia (albeit only for another 3 weeks!) so this is a relatively brief posting, based on one of the most interesting and intriguing encounters of our trip. I had not previously been to the north-eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes, and realised I'd been missing some very special places. The eastern slopes seem to me wilder and less populated than the western ones that I've seen, at least in the north. 

San Isidro Lodge is a beautiful place to stay in a large tract of mostly primary rainforest whose continued existence is due to the foresight of Simón Bustamante back in the 1970s when the government was making wild land available to people to clear for farming. Simón did something unexpected - he acquired the land and left nearly all of it in its pristine state despite considerable pressure on him to 'improve' it. Today there are nearly 1800 hectares of forest protected in the expanded reserve. 

Cloud forest protected by San Isidro; the lodge is at 2000 metres above sea level.

Some of the cabins and elevated viewing platform.

The lodge grounds themselves are full of wildlife and there is no reason to go far from the cabins before breakfast. (San Isidro is noted for its food almost as much as its birds!) Here are a couple of my personal favourites, both species which are almost totally restricted to the eastern slopes - the high treeless paramo along the spine of the Andes provides a near total barrier to forest birds, allowing evolution to proceed separately on the two slopes.

Inca (or Green) Jays Cyanocorax yncas (also found in southern North America) form large
raucous mobs around the cabins and dining room. They are stunning.

The exquisite Long-tailed Sylph Aglaiocercus kingi is a glorious hummingbird which fits the
east-west divide concept perfectly, with a sister species (Violet-tailed Sylph A. coelestis) on the western slopes.

However, there is one bird found around the cabins which doesn't seem to fit any established concepts - unless it is indeed that most marvellous of treats for a birder, an undescribed species. This big handsome owl is indeed widely known in birding communities as 'the Mystery Owl'. 

It is one of four species of the South American genus Ciccaba - at least according to the influential South American Classification Committee, though elsewhere the genus is often included in the more widespread wood owl genus Strix. The Mystery Owl is only known from the vicinity of the San Isidro Cabins, though I'm not sure how intensively the wild forests further away have been searched for it. It is closely related to the Black and White Owl C. nigrolineata of the western slopes and the Black-banded Owl C. huhula (I love that name!) of the eastern lowlands. In plumage and, reportedly, in voice, it seems midway between both those species. Indeed the general approach to it is to tentatively regard it as an isolated sub-species of Black-banded, though it seems to me there is little basis for that. 

The Black-banded has apparently never been recorded higher than 900 metres above sea level; if it can indeed live in the extensive forests higher than that, why has it never been found there? However, before I conclude, let's meet this delightful and amenable bird.

San Isidro's wonderful 'Mystery Owl', photo taken in the carpark, by torchlight.
It's a substantial owl, standing at least 40cm high. Nonetheless, based on the habits of its closest
relatives, it probably eats mostly insects, hence its attraction to the lights of the lodge.

In the bad old days (not so long ago in fact) it would have simply been 'collected' (ie with a shotgun) though before the advent of modern DNA testing this wouldn't actually have told us much. We need DNA samples - eg from feathers from a nest or under a roosting site, or from hatched eggs - to get the final answer, but we can wait for that. My own feeling is that it will prove to be a separate species, and will probably eventually be found more widely in the mid-level cloud forests. 

Meantime it's good for us to be reminded regularly of how much we don't know, and how much is lost without our ever knowing it as we continue to treat the earth so badly. We must also remember though that there are good dedicated people trying to make amends; I am grateful to everyone associated with San Isidro.

Try and visit some time.

BACK ON TUESDAY

Considering the Lilies; part 4

At last - you may well be thinking - here is the last in this series on the lovely lilies. It started here, and followed from there.

In this last posting I want to introduce you to some beautiful members of a family whose name may well be unfamiliar to you. Hemerocallidaceae was first proposed by the great Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1810 but was certainly not familiar to at least most Australian amateurs until very recent years when some familiar species from other families were shifted into it. Elsewhere in the world many people would go further and include the members of this family in the grass tree family Xanthorrhoeaceae, but here we prefer to give that wonderful group of quintessentially Australian plants their own family. You don't of course need to know any of this to enjoy the plants, but I thought I should mention it in passing to explain why the system I'm using here might seem strange to you. It might be too, but I didn't invent it!

One such subsumed family is (was) Phormiaceae, which includes the New Zealand flaxes Phormium spp. Though not a numerous family it is widely spread, due largely to the genus Dianella - referring to Diana, in her role of goddess of the woods. These are robust familiar herbs in this part of the world, where they are known as flax lilies.

Mountain Flax Lily Dianella tasmanica, Namadgi NP above Canberra.
Above can be seen the big strappy leaves and tall flower stem.
Below is a close-up of the lovely yellow-stamened blue flowers.

Following the flowers are almost equally attractive big glossy blue or purple berries.

Mountain Flax Lily berries were eaten by the Aboriginal people of the mountains, who also used the leaf fibres
(remember the flax part of the name) and pounded and roasted the roots.
This species is found in higher places from northern New South Wales to Tasmania.

The paler-flowered Dianella caerulea is found in near coastal and lower hinterland habitats,
often sandy, in much of eastern Australia.

Apart from Nodding Blue Lily (another formerly in Phormiaceae), the rest of the lilies to be showcased today were until recently in family Anthericaceae. 

Blue Grass Lily Caesia calliantha is another local lily with a wide eastern Australian distribution. It is found in grassy understoreys of open forests and woodlands. Other species are found in New Guinea and southern Africa.

Blue Grass Lily, Kama NR, Canberra.

Thelionema is a closely related and similar genus, containing just three species from eastern Australia.

Blue Tufted Lily Thelionema caespitosum, Tallong, New South Wales.
Yes, I know, an unfortunate name! White flowers get commoner at higher altitudes.

Stypandra is a very small genus, with one species in Western Australia only, the other, Nodding Blue Lily S. glauca, very widespread in eastern and southern Australia. It is flowering delightfully right now around here. The flowers are very similar to Dianella, but the plant is entirely different with tall leafy stems.

Nodding Blue Lily, above and below.
The plant can grow to a metre and a half high.

Johnsonia is a small genus of five lilies, all Western Australian. They have strange little sheathed flowers in a spike. The genus is named for Thomas Johnson, a 17th London physician and herb gardener who was also a serious field botanist and mountaineer. He had the honour of displaying the first bunch of bananas to be seen in England in his shop in 1639.

Pipe Lily Johnsonia pubescens, Yandin Lookout, north of Perth

Hooded Lily Johnsonia teretifolia, Shannon NP, south west Western Australia.

And finally for this series, a somewhat more conventional-looking lily. Yellow Rush Lily is found again widely in grassy areas in much of eastern and southern Australia, where it favours grassy areas and can stud such meadows with numerous flowers.

Yellow Rush Lily, above and below, Tidbinbilla NR, Australian Capital Territory.

I hope you've enjoyed meeting or re-meeting these lovely plants as much as I have enjoyed introducing them to you.

(I should mention perhaps that also in the huge order Asparagales are now included orchids, irises and grass trees, but I prefer to leave my definition of lilies short of them, and treat them as separate groups in due course.)

I'm currently in Ecuador, and this is as many posts as I had time to put up in advance before I left.
I'LL BE BACK ON DECK HERE WITH ANOTHER POST ON 7 NOVEMBER; I LOOK FORWARD TO CATCHING UP WITH YOU THEN.

Considering the Lilies; part 3

This is the penultimate posting of this series on the delightful lilies; see here for the first posting and how we're defining lilies. The second posting follows that one, so will be easy for you to find if you so desire. I'm going to continue with big order Asparagales. As ever I'm using the Australian interpretation of the taxonomy, as defined by the authoritative Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria; this is a work in progress, but the lilies have certainly been covered by them. 

Quite a few Australian lily genera have recently been incorporated into the huge family Asparagaceae, which has recently been greatly expanded to include many smaller families, notably in Australia Anthericaceae, in itself relatively newly in wide use here. It's that family I want to share with you today, though my examples are limited to Australian ones; I'll be happy to read your account of your own local species in due course!

One of the most delightful experiences I know is to walk through a field of the appropriately named Chocolate Lilies - the name is from the scent rather than taste (not that I can comment on the latter).

Chocolate Lily Arthropodium (formerly Dichopogon) fimbriatum, Bigga Cemetery, New South Wales.
To some people (including me) it does smell like dark chocolate, to others it more resembles vanilla.

There are two other members of the genus around here too; Vanilla Lily can be found in open areas around Canberra and high into the Snow Gum meadows. And I can't believe I don't have a newer, better photo of this abundant little plant!

Vanilla Lily Arthropodium milleflorum.This one does smell unequivocally of vanilla, but it was the edible tubers which
caught the attention of Aboriginal People.
The species name 'thousand flowers' does represent a touch of hyperbole!

Small Vanilla Lily Arthropodium minum.
This one is tiny, less than 30cm high with flowers only about 10mm across.

Chamaescilla is another genus of blue lilies, generally known as blue squills, squill being the name used for various European lilies, especially of the genus Scilla; don't ask me why though.

Chamaescilla spiralis, Esperance, Western Australia, growing, as so many western plants do, in pure sand.
As indicated below they can grow in huge colonies.
The spiralis refers to the twisted basal leaves, though they are not particularly obvious in these photos
(unlike the bud in the photo above).

Another small endemic Australian genus is Sowerbaea, named for highly regarded early 19th century English botanical artist James Sowerby. There are just six species, but found collectively in all Australian states.

Rush Lily Sowerbaea juncea, Ulladulla, New South Wales.
This one grows in near-coastal boggy heathland.

Purple Tassels Sowerbaea laxiflora, Perth.
Unusually, Western Australia doesn't have a monopoly on this genus!

An apparently atypical member is the Wombat Berry, the only member of the genus Eustrephus. Eustrephus latifolius is a quite robust climber with stems many metres long, found throughout eastern Australia in moister situations and on many Pacific islands.

Wombat Berry, Deua National Park, New South Wales.
The berries are edible, as are the tubers, as with many other members of this family.

The mat rushes - Lomandra spp. - comprise another lily group in this order which may not meet our expectations of what lilies should look like. At one stage they were incorporated into the Xanthorrhoea family then for some time given their own, Lomandraceae. Now however they have been included in the huge Asparagaceae. There are some 50 species of Lomandra, all Australian though a couple extend a little offshore. All are rush-like clumping plants, some of which can form important forest understoreys.

Lomandra longifolia Canberra.
Note that this is a planting (outside the National Portrait Gallery) - to my surprise my picture library lacked this species -
and for some reason the leaves had been slashed before flowering.

Probably my favourite genus in this family however - and indeed perhaps my favourite lily genus - is Thysanotus, the beautiful fringe lilies. Here Western Australia reasserts its claim to Australian wildflower supremacy, with 45 of the 50 known species living there. A few northern Australian species extend north into Asia too.

Here are a few of them.

Thysanotus manglesianus, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.

This one is a twiner, as is the next, common in early spring in Canberra dry forests (and well beyond).

Twining Fringe Lily Thysanotus patersonii, Canberra.

Another local fringe lily however is much more robust and stands erect.

Thysanotus tuberosus flowering post-fire, Morton NP, New South Wales.
As the name suggests it has an edible tuber, valued by Aboriginal People.
It has a huge distribution, from Victoria into the Queensland tropics and across the Torres Strait to New Guinea.
Naturally, this also means that it lives in a wide variety of habitats.

Thysanotus juncifolius, Mareeba, tropical Queensland.
This one has a similarly extensive distribution to the previous one, but isn't found in New Guinea.

The lovely lilies - and still one posting to go, on another large family.

 

CONTINUED HERE

Considering the Lilies: part 2

Last time I started an exploration of the wonderful world of lilies, including their complicated definition, which I finally settled upon, for the purposes of this blog, as plants which have in the past been included in the family Liliaceae - and there are very many of them! Not only has the giant pseudo-family been broken into 24 separate families, but this wealth of species is spread across two entire orders - it would be as though ducks and herons had recently been mixed in together, or carnivores with horses and rhinos. Last time we looked at some lilies which remain in the order Liliales; today I want to start looking at the larger order Asparagales.

First however, a couple of omissions from last time to rectify! I talked about some Australian members of the Liliales, but omitted a couple of rather lovely overseas members of the families discussed. Bear with me - they really are worth it.

Probably the best-known and most widespread member of the family Colchicaceae is the glorious Flame Lily (among many other names), also called, with some justifiable hyperbole, Gloriosa superba. It is found in much of Africa and Asia, and is the national flower of Zimbabwe. It is reputed in different places to cure almost every ill known to humankind, though it is highly toxic from top to bottom and is used as an arrow poison in West Africa.

Gloriosa superba near Masindi, Uganda.

Another family that we explored was the South American Alstromoeriaceae; again I left out a particularly lovely one that I ought not to have done! Luzuriaga has a classic Gondwanan distribution, the few species being found in Patagonia and New Zealand. L. polyphylla (Quilineja or Coral in Spanish - I'm not aware of an English name) is a beautiful climbing herb from the dripping wet temperate rainforests of the Lakes Region of northern Chilean Patagonia.

Quilineja seems to glow softly in the dark wet forests it inhabits.
Alerce Andino NP, near Puerto Montt, Chile.

So, to the order Asparagales. There are, as I've said, many families involved and today I'd like us to look at representatives of some of the smaller families.

Amaryllidaceae is probably best known for its cultivated members - daffodils and snowdrops for instance. However there are many beautiful ones to be found in the wild too of course. A couple of species occur in inland Australia, where they grow and flower, sometimes prolifically, as flood plains dry out. 

Darling Lily Crinum flaccidum, Lake Broadwater NP, Queensland.
They have a strong sweet scent in the evenings, suggesting they're pollinated by night-flying moths.

In Africa eight species of blood lilies, Scadoxus spp., are found widely. They are highly toxic with both leaves and bulbs containing potentially deadly alkoloids.

Scadoxus sp. (I think S. multiflorus - any clues anyone?), Mt Cameroon.

Asteliaceae is a largely Pacific family, most members of which are in the genus Astelia; New Zealand is its heartland, but there is one species in the far south of Patagonia, others scattered through the Pacific, and a couple in Australia.

Astelia alpina (above and below), Mount Field NP, Tasmania.
Known as Pineapple Grass though it is neither of course, but the name is appropriate!
It can dominate alpine understoreys in the south-eastern Australian alps.

 

Blandfordiaceae is a tiny family of just four species, all in the genus Blandfordia of eastern Australia. They are known as Christmas Bells for their mid-summer flowering and are much-loved. They grow generally in moist heathy areas.

Christmas Bells, Blandfordia nobilis, Morton NP, New South Wales.

Boryaceae is another small family, exclusively Australian, with most species in the genus Borya and in south-western Australia where they are especially found around great granite outcrops, drying out to apparent death and recovering dramatically when it rains. Unsurprisingly they are known as resurrection plants.

Borya sphaerocephala, Dingo Rock, south-west Western Australia.

Doryanthaceae is yet another tiny Australian endemic family, featuring just two giant species in the genus Doryanthes. Gymea Lily D. excelsa is found near the coast in rocky forests from Sydney to southern Queensland and is one of the most striking plants in Australia. In winter and early spring it puts up a massive flowering spike to four metres tall!

Gymea Lily, above and below, Royal National Park, Sydney.

Hypoxidaceae on the other hand is a near world-wide family, as is the large type genus with up to 150 species.

Yellow Star Hypoxis hygrometrica, Canberra.
The odd species name - it means 'water measuring' - refers to the curious fact that the plant's hairs
coil up when dry and extend when wet. To my knowledge this has never been explained!

Hypoxis sp., Ngaoundaba Ranch, central Cameroon.

And finally for today, family Asphodeliaceae, the aloes and asphodels. Some modern taxonomies subsume this one into the Xanthorrhoeas, which intuitively feels a bit odd, but this has not been accepted in Australia. Locally there are a couple of species of Bulbine Lily.

Bulbine bulbosa, Canberra.
In case you'd missed it, the name is trying to assure us that it has a bulb!
An edible one too apparently, well known to indigenous Australians.
This is a very common and cheerful spring flower in grassy areas locally.

Rock Lily Bulbine glauca, Namadgi National Park, above Canberra.
Unlike Bulbine Lily this one lacks an edible tuber; it replaces that species at higher altitudes.

And I think that will do us for today - you must be just about lilied out by now. We've not yet finished with the glorious lilies though; we'll wrap it up with a posting on each of two families, the next being the asparagus family!

BACK ON WEDNESDAY

CONTINUED HERE 

Considering the Lilies: part 1

The other day we were walking in Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve on the northern edge of Canberra; for the whole time we surrounded by millions of Early Nancies, low-growing native lilies.

Massed Early Nancies Wurmbea dioca Family Colchicaceae, Mulligans Flat NR, Canberra.

It got me thinking that lilies would be a great topic for a blog post, but the more I thought about it, and after I'd checked up on recent changes in thinking of the place of lilies in the world, I realised that there are actually at least two and probably three postings involved, just because of the numbers of 'lilies'. I use the inverted commas there because the question of what actually is a lily is a very vexed one. 

At one stage the answer seemed easy - everything in the family Liliaceae. But... The family was described by Antoine Jussieu in 1789, and was basically defined as any herb with six roughly equal flower parts, six stamens, an ovary that sits above the flower base, and three sections within the ovary. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that this definition included very many species indeed. In fact despite growing concerns which had begun to be expressed in the mid-19th century as to the validity of the family, by 1980 the definition had actually been broadened and the family included over 300 genera and nearly 5000 species!

Reality kicked in then and people began looking at the real relationships, resulting in a major break-up of the family and the erection of close to 50 new genera and quite a few new families. With new biochemical tools in particular, the work is proceeding and more changes have recently been made and widely accepted. The artificiality of the old family is underlined by the fact that former members have been spread across not just 24 families, but two Orders - in other words many members of the old Liliaceae aren't even moderately related! For the purposes of this blog I'm going to define a 'lily' as anything that has historically been regarded as such, but I'll also explain the current situation for anyone interested as we go.

I'm going to introduce today some of those members which stayed in the order Liliales (which is the smaller of the two), but first, some lilies in history.

You may not have suspected it, but onions and garlic (family Alliaceae) are lilies by this definition. They have been grown around the Mediterranean for at least 5000 years. The Greek historian Herodotus described an inscription on the Pyramid of Cheops detailing the large sums of money spent on onions, garlic and radish (unrelated) for the labourers. Somewhere I read that the first recorded sit-down strike was staged at the Necropolis in Thebes because the onion wage wasn't being paid. Quite right too! 

In the 13th century Florence was a world trading centre; their gold coins, embossed with a lily, were called fiorin d'oro, 'little gold flower', which entered English as 'florin'. Tulips - among the few remaining members of family Liliaceae - came to Austria from Turkey in 1554 and the craze spread throughout Europe. In Holland single bulbs sold for thousands of guilders; Belgian speculators traded at the van Beurse home, hence our word 'bourse' for a stock exchange. 'Paper tulips' were promisory notes, and millions of them circulated. When the government shocked everyone by demanding that the notes had to be honoured, people went bankrupt - and many went off tulips... Another lily, the hyacinth, arrived in Europe via the middle east from the western Asian plains in the mid-16th century; within two hundred years some 3000 varieties had been developed in Holland, of which we now know only around 150.

It's a long time in this post since a picture, a dangerous thing in a blog posting, so here are some lilies of the Order Liliales. The Americas aren't particularly well endowed with native lilies, especially in the south, but one notable central and South American family is Alstroemeriaceae, with just four genera but some 250 species, including some beauties. Two of these genera, Alstromoeria and Bomarea, account for nearly the entire family, each having 100-120 species.

Alstromoeria patagonica, Torres del Paine NP, southern Chile.
This tiny herb is endemic to Patagonia.

Bomarea sp., El Cajas NP, Andes above Cuenca, Ecuador.

Bomarea sp., 4000m high cloud forest, Manu NP, Peru.

In Australia we also have a few members of this order, including the cheerful little Early Nancies I mentioned earlier, in family Colchicaceae.

Wurmbea dioica, Mulligans Flat NR, Canberra.
As the species name implies the species is dioecious - it has separate male and female plants.
Female above, male below.

 

A less common member of the family locally is also a grassland lily, and also named for a human female!

Milkmaids, Burchardia umbellata, Bigga cemetery, New South Wales.
An umbel is a floral arrangement whereby all the flower stalks arise from a common point,
well illustrated here and again reflecting the species name.

Burchardia rosea, Kalbarri NP, Western Australia.

A third member of the family Colchicaceae locally is found in wet forests not far to the east of here.

Schelhammera undulata, Lilac Lily, Carrington Falls, New South Wales.
The flower streaks are nectar guides, advertising hoardings for pollinating insects.

Smilacaceae is another Liliales family found in Australia as well as widely elsewhere. The most familiar member in south-eastern Australia is Smilax australis, known unkindly as Lawyer Vine (one of several species so named in fact) because it is prickly and easy to become entangled in!

Smilax australis, Monga NP, New South Wales.
The leaves are most unusual among monocots - mostly herbaceous plants like lilies, orchids and grasses - in having
net-like leaf veins, instead of simple parallel veins.

We'll leave it there for now - there are many more lilies to meet! I must say though that one of the best known quotations about lilies, the famous biblical one, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin" leaves me baffled. I have never understood that one - are we being exhorted to a life of sloth, hoping for the best?? Oh well, best I stick to what I know a little about.

BACK ON WEDNESDAY FOR MORE OF THE STORY

CONTINUED HERE