Justine E Hausheer

Many of my childhood days were spent in creeks, flipping rocks and sweeping nets, seeing what small creatures I could find. After an afternoon among crayfish, frogs and minnows, I’d spend the evening paging through field guides, trying to identify and understand what I had encountered. On Earth Day, it’s common to ponder what made one a conservationist. For me, it’s this: time spent immersed in the outdoors tied to time spent immersed in books.

Regular readers will know that we often write about Australian wildlife. But more often than not, we’re intrigued by the more charismatic species… tree kangaroos and bowerbirds, cassowaries and ghost bats. These three new nature books from CSIRO make the case that there’s much to appreciate about the less traditionally charismatic creatures of the Australian continent.

Migration is perhaps one of the most well-recognized phenomena of the natural world. From the wildebeest traversing your television screen in  wildlife documentaries, to the warblers in your backyard, we’ve always been fascinated by animals on the move. Tens of thousands of years ago, knowledge about the movement of animals would have been critical to our own species’s survival. Today we can simply sit back and wonder at the spectacle. But not all migrations are obvious.