Interesting Bits and Pieces
From recent happenings or stories around Australia and the world.
A "delightful" endangered Hastings River mouse found to be thriving after the drought and bushfires.
The Hastings River mouse has been listed as endangered since 2000. Adult Hastings River mice average 135 millimetres in length and weigh about 90 grams.
Experts believe the total population of the Hastings River mouse could be as low as 10,000, but they are feeling optimistic after trapping and releasing a record number of the species this year deep in southern Queensland's Main Range National Park.
Celia, you are not being a nuisance and I do appreciate your difficulties after your stroke.
Full points to you for keeping posting on YLC and my very best wishes. Hugs!!
Why don't you bookmark your gardening thread in your browser so you can find it more easily.
Winner of Africa Geographic's 2021 Photographer of the Year.
Fly in the eye. Chobe National Park, Botswana. © Hannes Lochner
A lion cub tries to nudge dad, but the male is grumpy. At the click of the shutter, a fly passes through the focus point and the pupil of the eye. The blunt teeth indicate an old male – but clearly, one still to be feared. Cubs always tread lightly around the males, weary of a swipe.
https://africageographic.com/stories/photographer-of-the-year-2021-winners/
My favourite photo of the site you have placed RnR
I felt sad with the other photos, hate to see the lions attacking Giraffe, and I was not sure if the bloodied Leopard was after his dinner or had been injured.
But the bird is sweet.
Hadies Lear!
What a mess and how frightening to watch this in the videos that are shown
Mexico's state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, known as Pemex, later confirmed the fire had been put out, blaming a rupture in one of its underwater pipelines.
The ocean off Mexico 's Gulf Coast was up in flames Friday after a gas leak from an underwater pipeline sparked a fire on the surface of the water
Dramatic footage showed bright orange flames raging on the sea early Friday
The first instalment on a $1 billion loan from China's state bank is due this month but it's unclear whether Montenegro, whose debt has soared to more than double its GDP because of the project, will be able to pay it back. Running from Montenegro's Port of Bar on the Adriatic Sea to land-locked Belgrade, the road is at the heart of an intense debate about Chinese influence in Europe, both within EU member states and countries aspiring to join the bloc such as Montenegro and its Western Balkan neighbors Serbia, Macedonia and Albania.
Moment student captures 'large UFO' hovering over Devon seafront at night 'for ten seconds'
Matthew Evans, 36, spotted the bright unidentified object (R) while peeping out of his top-floor flat window last week. Photographs show four bright lights in a triangular-shaped formation lingering in the night's sky. The mature student managed to whip out his phone to take a picture but within seconds the suspect object whizzed off into the distance. Matthew, from Tidmouth, Devon, said: 'I couldn't help but see it.' (Also pictured, a full view from Matthew's house which seemingly shows bright lights hovering in the distance.)
This is a bit of a puzzle!
Floodwaters see long-absent native species return to the Menindee Lakes System in outback NSW.
After the awful mass fish kills witnessed in 2019, floodwaters, enough to fill Sydney Harbour twice, reached the largest natural depression in the wetlands system in April. Water levels throughout the system have been rising, and animals of all kinds are taking advantage of the new landscape.
Yabbies reawaken after years burrowed under the surface.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-04/menindee-lakes-wildlife-returns/100241772
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the longest-married presidential couple in US history, celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary.
Young midshipman Jimmy Carter needed a date one evening while he was home from the US Naval Academy, so his younger sister paired him with a family friend who already had a crush. He married that date in the summer of 1946 on July 7.
Since that day, they've travelled the world as naval officer and military spouse, American president and first lady, and finally as human rights and public health ambassadors.
Are you trying to compete with our English teacher Spectre ? 
One of Australian Wildlife Conservancy's longest-serving employees has died, aged 65.
Photographer Wayne Lawler established Australia's first environmental photo library. He travelled across the country, photographing the rarest and most threatened species.
Wayne Lawler captured Australia's rarest species, such as this numbat at western NSW's Scotia Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo supplied: Wayne Lawler/Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
"Wayne's image collection just for AWC consists of over 10,000 images from the start of his work up and through till he needed to slow down. That, in itself, is the largest collection of natural history photos in Australia documenting this kind of work.
AWC photographers Brad Leue and Wayne Lawler. Photo supplied: Wayne Lawler/Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
RIP Wayne Lawler. Such a wonderful legacy in his work.
BORED OLDIES LOL
Seniors Play Dress Up With Nature to Personify the Magic Around Us 
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Have you ever stared at a nature photo of an animal hiding in plain sight and had an almost impossible time trying to separate the creature from the background?
Camouflage (a.k.a. cryptic coloration) is an adaptive mechanism that helps organisms to blend in with their surroundings. It can be a life-saving form of self-defense. But when the camera lens captures senior citizens as integral, interconnected parts of the landscape they inhabit, it can also become a life-affirming revelation of self-expression.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Eyes as Big as Plates, a conceptual collaborative photography project between Finnish and Norwegian artists Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth started off as a riff on traditional Nordic folklore.
Ikonen, who’d been looking for a way to reinterpret the tales of trolls and magic creatures became intrigued by Hjorth’s photo series of Norwegian grandmothers and reached out to her.
After the two hooked up, the focus of the project evolved. “In the beginning, we were trying to illustrate certain phenomena—folklore, stories, figures from myth,” Ikonen told the BBC.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
But the pair soon realized they were onto something that spoke to the bigger picture about the ways in which the elderly are seen—or perhaps more accurately not seen—and valued by society; one that might hold a deeper universal significance than a simple reimagining of regional mythology.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Throughout history, elders have been traditionally revered for their experience and wisdom. Now, however, seniors often admit they feel as if they’ve been erased from the larger cultural conversation. But, by incorporating older models as almost sculptural elements into their compositions, Ikonen and Hjorth have created a body of work that takes ostensibly invisible individuals and makes them the center of attention.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Featured models are imbued with an eye-popping, organic connection to the environment. The result? Each stunning portrait reflects a personal narrative acknowledged and venerated rather than a life story dismissed and forgotten.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Since 2011, the globetrotting pair has traveled extensively, setting up their tripods to capture their sometimes whimsical, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes deeply moving scenarios everywhere from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Greenland, Iceland, the Czech Republic, France, the United States, Great Britain, the Faroe Islands, South Korea, Japan, Senegal, and Tasmania.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
The cast of characters they’ve cataloged includes former farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics—and even a 90-year-old novice parachutist.
“We just try to work with whatever the people we interview bring, wherever they are,” Hjorth told BBC.
Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
“We might be in Paris, and you might be at an opera soiree evening and there might be an old lady dancing, the last person on the dance floor,” Ikonen told CNN Style. “And you just think: Who is this fascinating person I have to meet? You approach them and ask, ‘Who are you and what are you doing tomorrow?’”
For those fascinating people who take the visionary shutterbugs up on the challenge, more often than not, that means finding themselves communing with nature in a manner they’d never imagined, and ultimately, being celebrated for posterity in ways they could never have dreamed of.
Terrifying video captured the moment a hoverboard exploded in front of Tamilisa Miner and her two young children and sent flaming shrapnel flying around their living room in Utah
Terrifying moment hoverboard EXPLODES in front of two young children in Utah | Daily Mail Online
A security camera filmed the incident at Miner's home in Lehi on June 17, showing her batting smoke away from the hoverboard after it overheated in her hallway
[I would find that frightening]
After 41 long years, Australia has another Wimbledon women's singles finalist to savour after Ash Barty produced a dazzling performance to defeat former champion Angelique Kerber. Living up to her billing as the world's No.1 player, the Queenslander prevailed 6-3 7-6 (7-3) in what she had called her 'ultimate test' on Thursday against the three-time German grand slam winner.
Great news for Australians at Wimbledon ...
Ash Barty wins the ladies' singles title.
The 25-year-old Australian world number one became the first Australian woman to lift the Venus Rosewater dish since fellow Indigenous tennis star Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1980.
Dylan Alcott wins his second Wimbledon singles title.
Australia's Dylan Alcott has claimed his second Wimbledon quad wheelchair singles championship with a straight-sets defeat of Dutchman Sam Schroder.
Crowds at Wimbledon's Centre Court gave a standing ovation to Oxford Covid vaccine designer Dame Sarah Gilbert
Covid vaccine designer Dame Sarah Gilbert is given a standing ovation at Wimbledon | Daily Mail Online