The Dromedary Camel is one animal that is not native to Australia, but has made itself right at home in the outback. Dromedary camels, the species of camel with one hump, were brought to Australia in the mid-19th century by explorers.

With their ability to adapt to the harshest desert conditions and go days without food or water, camels were the perfect choice to help early settlers conquer the arid interior of Australia.

The first camel arrived in Australia at Port Adelaide in 1840, and by the 1860's the animals were arriving by the hundreds. But by the 1920s, they had worn out their use and many were simply released into the wild.

Today, it's estimated that as many as 200,000 camels roam the dry regions of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and western Queensland.

Dromedary camels are right at home in the desert. To maintain strength in the hot, dry conditions, they can draw energy for their hump, which is actually a mound of fatty tissue. Camels can also change their body temperature by as much as 6 C, keeping it cooler than the air temperature, preventing perspiration and loss of fluid. And they can store heat accumulated during the scorching day and use it to keep warm in the cold desert night. Thanks to their unique digestive system, camels can eat and extract nutrition from almost anything - thorny scrub, dry twigs and leaves, bones and seeds. The animals even have two eyelids on each eye to help keep out sand and dust.

The roadrunner is a ground cuckoo famous for its distinctive appearance, its ability to eat rattlesnakes and its preference for scooting across the American deserts, as popularized in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Roadrunners are large, black-and-white, mottled ground birds with distinctive head crests. They have strong feet, a long, white-tipped tail and an oversized bills.
The birds range in length from 20 to 24 inches. Roadrunners are members of the Cuckoo Family, Cuculidae, characterized by feet with 2 forward toes and 2 behind.

When the roadrunner senses danger or is traveling downhill, it flies, revealing short, rounded wings with a white crescent. But it cannot keep its large body airborne for more than a few seconds, and so prefers walking or running (up to 17 miles per hour) usually with a clownish gait.

Roadrunners inhabit open, flat and rolling terrain with a scattered cover of dry brush, chaparral and other desert scrub. The roadrunner is uniquely suited to a desert environment by a number of physiological and behavioral adaptations. Its carnivorous habits offer it a large supply of very moist food and it reabsorbs water from its feces before excretion. Roadrunners also hold a nasal gland that eliminates excess salt, instead of using the urinary tract like most birds. It can reduce its activity 50% during the heat of midday and its extreme quickness allows it to snatch a humming bird or dragonfly in midair.

The Roadrunner feeds almost exclusively on other animals, including insects, scorpions, lizards, snakes, rodents and other birds. Up to 10 % of its winter diet may consist of plant material due to the scarcity of desert animals at that time of the year. Because of its lightening quickness, the Roadrunner is one of the few animals that preys upon rattlesnakes. Using its wings like a matador's cape, it snaps up a coiled rattlesnake by the tail, cracks it like a whip and repeatedly slams its head against the ground till dead. It then swallows its prey whole, but is often unable to swallow the entire length at one time so it will continue to meander about with the snake dangling from its mouth, consuming another inch or two as the snake slowly digests.

When spring arrives, the male roadrunner, in addition to acquiring food for himself, offers choice morsels to a female as an inducement to mating. He usually dances around her while she begs for food, then gives her the morsel after breeding briefly. Both parents collect the small sticks used for building a shallow, saucer-like nest, but the female actually constructs it in a bush, cactus or small tree. She then lays from 2 to 12 white eggs over a period of 3 days, which results in staggered hatching. Incubation is from 18-20 days and is done by either parent, though preferably the male, because the nocturnally incubating males maintain normal body temperature.

The first to hatch often crowd out the late-arriving runts, which are sometimes eaten by the parents. Usually only 3 or 4 young are finally fledged from the nest after about 18 days. These remain near the adults for up to 2 more weeks before dispersing to the surrounding desert.

A roadrunner stands in the tall grass

One of several subspecies of the common and widespread Asiatic or Mainland Serow, the Sumatran Serow is restricted to the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

The Sumatran Serow has a coarse, variable-coloured, often dark, coat with a prominent white or brown neck mane, and a short beard from the mouth to the ears.

No population estimate is available but it has been severely reduced in numbers and range by excessive hunting for its flesh, hide and horns, and habitat loss to cultivation.

Once widely occurring in the thick, wooded gorges and boulder-strewn slopes above 300 m on the slopes of volcanoes and mountains throughout Sumatra, it is now confined to the higher, more remote elevations of the Aceh highlands in the north, the Kerinci highlands in the centre and the Barisan highlands in the south.

The Sumatran Serow is protected by law and occurs in several Protected Areas.


A Japenese Serow, similar to a Sumatran Serow.

The Colombian weasel is probably the rarest carnivore in South America. As of 1989, virtually nothing was known about its distribution, its status or its ecology.

In 1994, the Columbian weasel was classified as endangered. As of 1996, only five specimens of the Colombian weasel were known. Three of them were originally mislabeled as the long-tailed weasel before the Colombian weasel had been identified as a separate species.

The five specimens of the Colombian weasel have been found in the highlands of the Cordillera Central of western Colombia and in the Andes of northern Ecuador. There is extensive deforestation in the area where it has been found; however, it is not yet established whether this is having an adverse effect on the weasel

One Colombian weasel weighed 138 g (5 oz). Known specimens have been collected in areas close to water at elevations of 5740' and 8900', an altitude where cloud forests predominate. One specimen was collected in a region of the upper Suaza River valley where the river contains stretches with torrential currents which are interrupted by quiet pools. However, the most recent collection was in rugged terrain, but not near water. Webbing between the toes and its (mostly) riparian distribution suggests that the Colombian weasel is aquatic.

Inhabitants of areas adjoining sites where the Colombian weasel was being studied were asked which mammals they were familiar with. Almost all farm-dwelling people questioned had seen weasels, and usually thought of them as pests, since most encounters involved predation upon chickens or domestic guinea pigs.


A long-tailed weasel, similar to a Colombian weasel.