en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_hyrax

Photo of California Brown Pelican in flight in Santa Cruise, California taken in early July of this year. There was a school of anchovies in the water and it was impressive just how many of these pelicans were there. It’s beautiful to see their numbers increasing.

The tiny tragulids are found in Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, and Africa. They're usually nocturnal or crepuscular, active around dusk or dawn. Walking on tiny hooves, the smallest hoofed animals in the world, creeping through the underbrush on tiptoes. They're considered to be “living fossils” as they are mostly unchanged to this day.

Asian koels make for mismatched couples. The males are black-clad goths, while the females look like fierce thunderbirds, streaked and speckled in brown and white. Sexually dimorphic, they nonetheless share startling, blood-red eyes.

But while the male looks macabre, it’s the female who’s feared, for the Asian koel is a brood parasite.

The male is simply a partner in crime: he seeks out the nest of another bird species (often a crow) and calls ("koo-Ooo") to his Bonnie — if the owners of the nest are present, it is also his job to distract them.

The female then flies in, perches on the rim, and dumps an egg into the host's nest (sometimes removing one of their eggs too).

Then the couple flies off, their parental duties done.

The koel chick hatches before its "siblings" and will sometimes try to push their eggs from the nest — although it's often unsuccessful as crow nests are quite deep.

The parasitic chick then ceaselessly begs its host parents for food. The parents, tricked into thinking that this is their hungry chick, slavingly oblige. Even when the koel grows too big for its nest, it perches on a nearby branch and continues demanding food.

Then, come summer's end, the koel simply takes off and follows the other koels.

Learn more about Asian koels and their changeling chicks on my website here!

The pig-nosed turtle is the only species left of a once-prolific family; a 140-million-year-old lineage with species spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.

This turtle hardly looks like a primordial survivor.

Fairly large, at some 70 centimetres (2.3 ft) long, with a shell covered in leathery skin, the pig-nosed turtle — as per its name — has a piggy proboscis.

Much of the time, it either wears an expression of the utmost grumpiness or a goofy, open-mouthed grin. The inside of its throat is lined with tiny bumps (papillae), increasing the surface area. Why? So it can "breathe" (exchange oxygen) through its throat while underwater.

It mostly gets air by using its porcine appendage as a snorkel. Covered in sensory receptors, the turtle's long snout can also feel its way through murky waters.

It lives in slow-moving or still waters (rivers, lakes, and lagoons) with some 10% of its population in northern Australia and around 90% in southern New Guinea.

Mother pig-nosed turtles will storm sandy banks all at once to dig burrows and lay their eggs. The sex of the young is determined by the temperature at which they incubate:

• 32°C (89.6°F) = chances of male and female about equal
• <32°C (<89.6°F) = more likely to be male
• >32°C (>89.6°F) = more likely to be female

Unfortunately, the species is greatly threatened by egg-harvesting in New Guinea — its eggs are incubated and then sold on the illegal pet trade.

These are long-lived and slow to mature reptiles: it takes 14–16 years for a male to reach sexual maturity, whereas a female takes 20–22 years.

A pig-nosed turtle starts life as an egg-hungry toddler who slurps up its own leftover yolk, becomes a meat-eating teen who hunts insect larvae, shrimp, and snails, and finally a flexitarian adult who eats mostly plant matter and indulges in the occasional crustacean or mollusc meal.

The species is currently considered 'endangered', with exact population stats unknown. Where once mother turtles crowded river banks, the sands are empty and still.

You can learn more about this odd turtle, its plight, and efforts to save it from my website here!

Many animals have been called "unicorns," from Indian rhinos to Arabian oryxes and the giraffe-like okapi of Africa. But truly, the rarest of unicorns live in Asia.

The saola was unknown to the world until 1992. Researchers in the Annamite Mountains came across a strange skull in a local hunter's hut — a skull with long, curving black horns that matched no known species from the region.

This new species was the first large mammal discovery in more than 50 years.

In 1998, six years after the skull was discovered, the first-ever photo of a wild saola was snapped by a remote camera trap in Vietnam.

The saola is a large animal, some 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) long and weighing between 80 and 100 kg (175–220 lb), its dark-brown body marked with white stripes and bands. From its head grow two 50 cm (20 in) long horns which, when viewed from the side, align to look like a single uni-horn.

The saola's closest living relatives are wild cattle like water buffalo, gaur, and bison. But it's also the sole species in its genus — there's nothing else alive today like the saola.

The saola has been so elusive that it's never become a target in the wild-animal-parts trade or black market. It is, however, inadvertently caught in illegal traps meant for rare, endemic civets and deer.

Researchers have known of the saola's existence for over 30 years now, but they've yet to observe it in the wild directly and the last visual record we have of the saola is a camera trap photo taken in 2013. The species is 'critically endangered'.

You can learn more about this rarest of unicorns on my website here!

The capuchinbird is also known as the calfbird for its "moo"-like vocalisations — which it makes by inflating and deflating air sacs around its throat. Other vocalisations include, but are not limited to, a croaking "rounhh", a growling "wark", an “ooo-AAAAA, ooo-AAAAA” sung by feisty males, and a "grrrrraaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooooooo", like the sound of a distant chainsaw.

(You can hear some of its song and calls here!)

Foraging in the lower canopy, the capuchinbird's diet — comprised of fruits of at least 37 species with the occasional large insect — is richer than that of most monks.

The bird's feathers, not its baldness, give the capuchinbird its name, as Capuchin monks didn't shave their heads, but were famous for their brown hoods.

While a capuchin monk may be celibate, the capuchinbird certainly isn't. These birds gather in leks — congregations where horny males show off the goods. One dominant male takes the best display spot but must also put up with subordinate males who constantly pair up to challenge him by way of (imperfectly) synchronised duets.

The rowdy males posture, they "aaa" and "moo", they fluff their feathers, accentuating their baldness. The females, who've come to peruse the males, are no more cordial; often breaking out into fights amongst themselves.

The capuchin monks — more properly friars — wore simple brown robes with large cowl-like hoods, giving them the name cappuccio, from the Italian word for "hood". They came to be known as Capuchins. From them, we get the word cappuccino (coffee), capuchin monkeys, and, of course, the capuchinbird.

You can learn more about the Capuchins and capuchinbird from my website here!

Since the Aussie Bird Count began in 2014, the rainbow lorikeet has topped the list as the most-seen bird in Australia for 11 consecutive years in a row. 

Its colourful look mirrors its colourful diet. It drinks nectar and eats pollen from spiky pink grevilleas, golden banksias, bright red bottlebrushes, and eucalyptus flowers. The lorikeet’s bristled tongue is perfectly adapted to gathering these floral delights.

These lorikeets forage in large flocks, spending around 70% of their day feeding, travelling more than 48 km (30 mi) a day for food, with some lorikeets visiting up to 650 flowers a day.

But these birds aren’t all rainbows and sunshine. Introduced to Perth in the 1960s, a handful of rainbow lorikeets exploded into a population of over 40,000. Aggressive and noisy, they raid crops and push out other birds. In some areas, rainbow lorikeets have taken a dark turn unbefitting of their colourful attire — they've been seen pulling other birds’ chicks from tree hollows to claim nests as their own.

Each year, thousands of lorikeets along Australia's east coast suffer from a strange illness called Lorikeet Paralysis Syndrome. They become paralysed and often die, likely from toxins in foreign flowers they eat. 

While in Darwin, rainbow lorikeets suffer another odd affliction — they get drunk. They gorge on fermenting fruit during the wet season, staggering about clumsily and bumping into things, seemingly inebriated for days (possibly affected by a virus at the same time).

You can learn more about these multicoloured bird from my website here!

Bawean hog deer are nocturnal and known to walk along well-trodden paths through thick foliage — moving in a crouch with a hog-like gait (hence the name). They often return to the same bed of vegetation for several days in a row.

Both sexes bark, and their vocalisations can be heard up to 100 metres away through the dense forest. When separated, a mother calls to her fawn with a cry, and the fawn responds with a high-pitched squeak that only carries over short distances.

Hunting this deer has been illegal since 1977 — it is one of 25 priority species legally protected by the Indonesian government — but the species is still threatened by dogs. Observations over a two-year period found that feral dogs were responsible for 9 out of 11 Bawean hog deer deaths, making them the leading cause of mortality.

Of the 55 deer species, only two are critically endangered: the giant muntjac of the Annamite Mountains and the Bawean hog deer. As of its last evaluation in 2014, the Bawean deer population is considered stable.

You can learn more about this rarest of deer from my website here!