Climate, Vegetation and Wildlife
Owing to the rain shadow created by the Otway Ranges to the southwest, the You Yangs are in the driest part of Victoria south of the Great Dividing Range. Annual rainfall is as little as 450 millimetres (18 in), with the result that the vegetation is grassland or low woodland rather than forest.
The You Yangs are home to more than 200 bird species such as White-naped, White-plumed, New Holland and Brown-capped Honeyeaters, Kookaburras, White-winged Choughs, Crested Shrike-tits, Purple-crowned Lorikeets, Eastern Yellow Robins, and Scarlet Robins, as well as Eastern Grey Kangaroos, Sugar Gliders, Brushtail and Ringtail Possums and Koalas. The nearby Serendip Sanctuary, a Victorian government wildlife research centre now open to the public, has been involved in breeding endangered Victorian wildlife species, such as the Australian Bustard.
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Famous quotes containing the words vegetation and/or wildlife:
“We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)