Hope's Cycad - Lepidozamia hopeii Growing at an estimated meter per century, the venerable Hope’s Cycad - Lepidozamia hopei (W.Hill) Regel, attains a potential height of twenty-metres across two-millennia.  Reproducing about once every seven years, with both male and female plants producing large reproductive cones atop their axes, appears to be both periodic but also triggered by cyclones.  In the critical phase of cone

I heard my first Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher - Tanysiptera sylvia (Gould, 1850) for the year, today.  It arrived from West Papua or Papua New Guinea to nest exclusively in the epigeal or terrestrial termite mounds of Microcerotermes serratus (Froggatt, 1898).  Largely-symmetrical ellipsoid nests contain complex tunnels and chambers that regulate temperature, humidity and oxygen, to cultivate the growth of fungi that the termites