The corncrake: Our own ‘Abominable Snowman’

CLIMBERS on Everest reported distant sightings of a ghostly human-like ape high in the mountains, a nightmare creature, the Abominable Snowman.

Hillary and Tenzing’s expedition of 1953 found strange footprints in the snow 6,000 metres up. Mountaineers heard weird calls which their Sherpa guides claimed were those of the notorious ‘Yeti’. No authentic hair or body samples were ever found so what could have made the tracks? Belief in the existence of the Yeti has waned but, in 2004, the editor of Nature suggested such reports deserved further study. His remarks followed the discovery of a previously unknown species of human which survived, perhaps until 12,000 years ago, on Flores Island off Indonesia. Could other ancient hominids be alive today?

A bird, not quite as mysterious as the Abominable Snowman, has been photographed and filmed by the naturalist John Young. The night parrot, yellowish green and about the size of a thrush, is one of the world’s most elusive creatures. It lives among the long spinifex grasses which cloak the arid regions of Australia. Known from about two dozen museum specimens, this secretive night worker is so elusive that it was deemed by many to be extinct. Some even doubted that it ever existed. Then, in 1990, the remains of one were found on a remote stretch of road in Queensland. The bird appeared to have been struck by a vehicle. According to BirdLife International’s fact-sheet, two other carcasses were found since then, one in Western Australia in 2005 and the other, that of a juvenile, in Diamantina National Park the following year.