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Pink flannel flowers are extremely rare and only grow in scattered parts of eastern Australia, from the Blue Mountains to north-eastern Victoria.
A sea of colour has swept across wide swaths of Australia s Blue Mountains just a year on from the huge bushfires as long-dormant pink flannel flowers spring to life. The flowers, known as bushfire ephemerals because their seeds only germinate after fire, are blooming in formerly burnt landscapes from Katoomba to Lithgow and north to Newnes.
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Long-dormant pink flannel flowers have sprung to life. “There’s a mass synchronicity of flowering,” Dr Mark Ooi, a senior research fellow at the University of NSW’s Centre for Ecosystem Science, said. “The pink flannel flowers provide this beautiful contrast” against a backdrop of burnt-out regions from the 2019-20 blazes, he said.
Colour little help in telling a dingo from a wild dog, research shows
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It turns out you canât tell a dingo from the colour of its pelt, with almost half of the wild dogs surveyed in south-eastern Australia carrying a hue other than the ginger usually associated with the animal.
Research published on Monday in the
Journal of Zoology found that of 1325 wild canids â the family of animals taking in wolves, dingoes and your pet pooch â only 53 per cent sported ginger coats.
In October 2020, two trail bike riders discovered four orphaned dingo cubs in a hollow log on Yaitmathang country in the Victorian High Country. Two ran off, but two who were captured - Myrtle and Moko - could change the way dingoes are treated in Australia.
Speaking with NITV News, the Australian Dingo Foundation s Dingo Discovery Sanctuary and Research Center Manager Kevin Newman said it s difficult to tell how old Myrtle and Molo were when they came to the sanctuary, because they were so small. They were about three kilograms, because they were quite malnourished, said Mr Newman. Close to death, they had survived for several weeks on a diet of grass and crickets. They were obviously quite psychologically damaged as well.
Pure alpine dingo cubs found in Victoria s High Country reveal threatened species still exists, experts say
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The siblings were severely malnourished when they were discovered.
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Sibling cubs recently rescued in Victoria s High Country have become the latest to be revealed as purebred alpine dingoes.
Key points:
Two orphaned pure alpine dingo pups have been found in north-east Victoria
UNSW s Dr Kylie Cairns says dingos are a native species and important to healthy ecosystem function as Australia s apex predator
Australian Dingo Foundation s Lyn Watson says the pups likely became orphaned after their parents were trapped and shot
“They should not be handing out petroleum leases whilst they are undertaking consultation to protect these areas.”
Prof Richard Kingsford, director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW, has been researching the floodplains of Cooper Creek for two decades.
He said the Cooper Creek floodplain could bulge as wide as 80km during flood in the area of the leases.
He said the basin was an “incredibly complex” system of ephemeral rivers and lakes that can go from isolated pools and dried-up channels during dry periods to rivers many kilometres wide during floods, unleashing an explosion of birds, plant and insect life.