![]() ![]() One thing they can do, however, is eat huge amounts of plant matter in a day. Up close, they have huge, powerful feet and claws that can disembowel a Komodo dragon, but left alone, they tend to flock at a distance from potential threats. ![]() The emus were easy to scare in the beginning because they’re large, relatively gentle herbivores. Until 1932, they had always come in small groups and were generally easy to scare away from the fields. Those are the two things that farms have in abundance, and so the first few waves of stray emus started drifting in the late 1920s. When the interior gets exceptionally dry, native animals tend to migrate toward the edges looking for food and water. This comes in part because Australia’s interior has a very dry and unpredictable climate where droughts are common. Just as in the United States, which was doing almost exactly the same thing in Kansas and Oklahoma at the time, this almost immediately led to overfarming, over- or under-irrigation, and generally unsustainable land practices. ![]() Letting one problem solve another, the Australian government issued land grants in a kind of Down Under Homestead Act, giving each veteran as much land as he could farm on the edges of Australia’s harsh, unforgiving Outback. At the same time, the vast interior of the continent remained - it was felt - shamefully underdeveloped. The survivors who staggered back had trouble adjusting to civilian life. Australia had sacrificed terribly in that war, sending tens of thousands of its young men to die in the doomed Gallipoli Campaign. The trouble began for Australia shortly after World War I. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |