title: Arancini

text: In Italian literature, Inspector Montalbano, the main character of Andrea Camilleri's detective novels, is a well-known lover of arancini – especially those made by Adelina Cirrinciò, his housekeeper and cook. The success of the book series and the television adaptation has contributed to making this dish known outside of Italy.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Songkran (, ) is the Thai New Year's national holiday. Songkran is on 13 April every year, but the holiday period extends from 14 to 15 April. In 2018 the Thai cabinet extended the festival nationwide to five days, 12–16 April, to enable citizens to travel home for the holiday. In 2019, the holiday was observed 12–16 April as 13 April fell on a Saturday. The word "Songkran" comes from the Sanskrit word "", literally "astrological passage", meaning transformation or change. It coincides with the rising of Aries on the astrological chart and with the New Year of many calendars of South and Southeast Asia, in keeping with the Hindu Calendar and Buddhist calendar. The New Year takes place at virtually the same time as the new year celebrations of many countries in South Asia like Bangladesh, Cambodia, China (Dai People of Yunnan Province), India (Baisakhi in Punjab, Bengal Gajan Utsav, Bengal Charak Utsav, Bengali New Year (Poyla Baisakh/Nababarsha) in West Bengal and Tripura,Bihu in Assam,Gudipadva in Maharashtra, Pana or Mahabisuba Sankranti in Odisha, Ugadi in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Vishu in Kerala etc.), Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: In Thailand, New Year is now officially celebrated 1 January. Songkran was the official New Year until 1888, when it was switched to a fixed date of 1 April. Then in 1940, this date was shifted to 1 January. The traditional Thai New Year Songkran was transformed into a national holiday. Celebrations are famous for the public water fights framed as ritual cleansing.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: "Songkran" is a term derived from Sanskrit संक्रान्ति saṅkrānti meaning 'to move' or 'movement'. It derives from the movement of the sun from one position to another in the zodiac. According to its literal meaning in Sanskrit, a Songkran occurs every month. However, the period that Thai people refer to as Songkran happens when the sun moves from Pisces to Aries in the zodiac. The correct name for this period should actually be "Maha Songkran" ('great Songkran) because it coincides with the arrival of a New Year. The Songkran festival is, therefore, a celebration of the New Year in accordance with the solar calendar. The celebration covers a period of three days: 13 April is regarded as "Maha Songkran", the day that the sun moves into Aries on the zodiac or the last day of the old year. The next day, 14 April is called "Wan Nao", the transitional day between the old and the new years, and 15 April is called "Wan Thaloeng Sok" ( 'to begin a new era or year'), New Year's day itself.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: In 1989, the Thai cabinet fixed Songkran at 12–14 April, despite the correct starting date (13 April at 20:57). Songkran, however, was traditionally computed according to the method described in "Suriyayart" (), the Thai version of Surya Siddhanta. The celebration starts when the sun enters Aries according to the sidereal zodiac system. This is called "Maha Songkran" day (). The final day marks the new solar year and is called "Wan Thaloengsok" (). The astrologers, local or royal, then make predictions about the economy, agriculture, rainfall, and political affairs according to observations between both days. The king, or Chief Royal Astrologer on the monarch's behalf, issued an official notification on the new year to the public. The announcement, called "Prakat Songkran" (, Songkran notification), contained the information on "Maha Songkran", "Thaloengsok", the lunisolar calendar, and religious and royal ceremonies. The government strictly adhered to the announcement and arranged some ceremonies according to the computation made by the royal astrologer.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: According to the scripture, 800 years equal 292,207 days. In other words, each solar year lasts 292,207 "kammaja" (, lit. one produced by karma), where 1 "kammaja" equals 108 seconds and 800 "kammaja" corresponds to 1 solar day. Timekeeping began as "Kali Yuga" started in 3102 BCE (−3101 CE). At the start of each year, it is possible to compute the number of days since "Kali Yuga" commenced using the following formula:


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: where formula_2, formula_3, formula_4 denote "Kali" Era, Common Era, and Buddhist Era respectively. formula_5 is the "Suriyayart" day number, which can vary according to the calendar era being used. The integer result is the count of days at New Year's Day, while the remainder indicates the time at which the new year begins (in "kammaja"), measured from the previous midnight.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Owing to a huge day number in the calculation, new calendar eras were devised to solve this problem, including the Minor Era (ME). 0 ME corresponds to 1181 BE, 638 CE or 3739 KE. Following the above equation, it follows that there were 1,365,702 days since the start of "Kali Yuga". The remainder of the division suggests that the new year started at 373 "kammaja" after the previous midnight. This corresponds to 373/800 of a day or 11 hours, 11 minutes, and 24 seconds. In other words, 0 ME started at 11:11:24 on Sunday, 25 March 638 CE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. The Julian day at the new year is computed according to the following formula:


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The number can then be converted back into a date using an algorithm (see Julian day). "Maha Songkran" day is computed either by a lengthy process or by subtracting formula_7 by 2.165 days (2 days 3 hours 57 minutes 36 seconds). This can be rewritten as


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: A solar year lasts 292,207 "kammaja" or 365.25875 days every year. However, a Gregorian year lasts, on average, 292194 "kammaja". The difference of 13 "kammaja" (23 minutes, 24 seconds) accumulates every year, causing the shift of Songkran towards the end of the calendar year. In 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000, Maha Songkran was on 7 April 9 April, 10 April 12 and 13 April respectively.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Nowadays the royal palace has ceased to issue the "Prakat Songkran", replacing it with a small calendar booklet given to the public on New Year's Day. Government Savings Bank still prints a one-page lunisolar calendar, which is different from the multiple-page solar calendar commonly seen. The calendar features the image of "Nang Songkran" with her vehicle and subordinates, led by a Chinese zodiac animal holding a flag with Thai script for that zodiac. It also contains a piece of comprehensive information on the correct Songkran day and religious days. Some astrologers, especially in northern Thailand, still issue their own Songkran notification containing predictions and other information. In 2013, the Chiang Mai Provincial Council decided to defy the government-set holiday by rescheduling the ceremony according to the correct calculation.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The following table lists the start and end dates of Songkran festival obtained from the formulae discussed above. The Chinese zodiac for each year is also given since it is also used in Thai astrology. However, the Chinese zodiac in Chinese astrology changes on "Lichun", just before the Chinese New Year, in February, while Thai astrology uses the first day of fifth lunar month (roughly the new moon in late–March to early–April). Before the cut off date, astrologer uses the zodiac of the last year.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: According to the Buddhist scripture of Wat Pho, Songkran originated from the death of Kapila Brahma (). In the olden days, there was a wealthy man and his neighbor, a drunkard. The drunkard, who had two sons, belittled the rich man for being childless. The rich man was humiliated and beseeched the Sun and the Moon gods to grant him a son. His attempts failed until he offered cooked rice to the tree god living in a banyan tree, who asked Indra to grant the man's wish. The child, named Thammabal (, also Dhammapala, ), was born.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Thammabal was a clever child who learned three vedas, bird language and also taught people to avoid sin. Kapila Brahma learned of the child and wanted to test the child's cleverness. The god asked, "Where is the glory of men ("sri") located in the morning, during the day, and in the evening?" The loser would have his head chopped off. The boy thought in vain for six days, but could not find a solution to the riddles. He lay beneath a sugar palm tree and overheard a conversation between a pair of eagles who planned to eat his corpse when he lost the bet. The female eagle asked her mate whether he knew the answer. He answered, "In the morning, the "sri" appears on the face, so people wash their faces every morning. At noon, the "sri" is at the chest where people spray perfume every noon. In the evening, the "sri" goes to the feet, so people wash their feet every evening." Thmmabal memorized the answer and gave it to Kapila Brahma the next day. Having lost, Kapila Brahma summoned his seven daughters and told them that he must cut his head off. However, if his head fell to earth, it would create an inferno that would engulf the world. If his head was thrown into the air, the rains would stop. And if his head was dropped into the ocean, all seawater would dry up. To prevent these calamities, he told his daughters to place his head on an elevated phan. Thungsa, his eldest child, stored her father's head in the cave in Mount Kailash.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Every year when the Sun enters Aries, one of Kapila Brahma's children, called the "Nang Songkran" () for that year, and other angels form a procession. One of them takes the phan with Kapila Brahma's head. The lady stands, sits, reclines or sleeps on the back of the animal depending on the time. From the dawn to midday, the lady will stand on the back of her conveyance. After midday until the sunset, she will sit down. Between the sunset and midnight, the lady lies down on her vehicle but leaves her eyes open. After midnight, she sleeps. These postures and other details were previously drawn as part of the "Prakat Songkran" and now as part of the lunisolar calendar. The procession lasts for 60 minutes around Mount Meru. This is subsequently called "Maha Songkran" to distinguish from other "Songkran" that occur when the Sun moves from one to another zodiac. For simplicity, the name was later shortened as "Songkran".


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The following table lists the names and characteristics of "Nang Songkran", which vary according to which day of the week "Maha Songkran" falls on in each year.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The Songkran celebration is rich with symbolic traditions. Mornings begin with merit-making. Visiting local temples and offering food to the Buddhist monks is commonly practiced. On this specific occasion, performing water pouring on Buddha statues and the young and elderly is a traditional ritual, representing purification and the washing away of one's sins and bad luck. As a festival of unity, people who have moved away usually return home to their loved ones and elders. Paying reverence to ancestors is an important part of Songkran tradition.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The holiday is known for its water festival. Major streets are closed to traffic, and are used as arenas for water fights. Celebrants, young and old, participate in this tradition by splashing water on each other. Traditional parades are held and in some venues "Lady Songkran" or "Miss Songkran" is crowned. where contestants are clothed in traditional Thai dress.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Central Region People in this region clean their houses when Songkran approaches. All dress up in colorful clothing or Thai dress. After offering food to the monks, people will offer a requiem to their ancestors. People make merit offerings such as giving sand to the temple for construction or repair. Other forms of merit include releasing birds and fish. Nowadays, people also release other kinds of animals such as buffaloes and cows. Phra Pradaeng hosts traditional ceremonies of Mon people such as parades in the colourful traditional outfits and folklore performances.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: South Southerners have three Songkran rules: Work as little as possible and avoid spending money; do not hurt other persons or animals; do not tell lies.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: North On 7 April, Baan Had Siew in Si Satchanalai District hosts the'Elephant Procession Ordination' event with a colourful parade where men dressed in the traditional clothes are taken to the temples on elephants. In northern Thailand 13 April is celebrated with gunfire or firecrackers to repel bad luck. On the next day, people prepare food and useful things to offer to the monks at the temple. People have to go to temple to make merit and bathe Buddha's statue and after that they pour water on the hands of elders and ask for their blessings.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: East The eastern region has activities similar to the other part of Thailand, but people in the east always make merit at the temple throughout all the days of the Songkran Festival and create sand pagodas. Some people, after making merit at the temple, prepare food to be given to the elderly members of their family.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The Capital (Bangkok) The Khao San Road and Silom Road are the hubs for modern celebration of Songkran. The roads are closed for traffic, and posts equipped with water guns and buckets full of water. The party runs day and night.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Songkran is celebrated by the Malaysian Siamese community, particularly in the states of Kedah, Kelantan, Penang, Perak, Perlis and Terengganu where most Siamese are located.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Pana Sankranti, (Odia: ପଣା ସଂକ୍ରାନ୍ତି) also known as Maha bisuba Sankranti, is the traditional new year day festival of Buddhists and Hindus in Odisha, India.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The festival is celebrated as Sangken in northeastern areas of India and as Bizu, Boisuk, Shangrai, and Boisabi in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, which is the traditional New Year's Day by the indigenous Hindu people and Buddhist community. The Sangken festival is celebrated by the Tai people — Khamti people Khamyang, Phake and Turung people. The festival is also celebrated by Singpho, Tikhak (Tangsa) and Duoniya people. Sangken generally falls in the month of 'Naun Ha', the fifth month of the year of the Tai Lunar calendar coinciding with the month of April. It is celebrated in the last days of the old year and the lunar new year begins on the day just after the end of the festival.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Vishu, a Hindu religious festival, celebrated mainly in the South Indian State of Kerala (and some parts of Tamil Nadu), also falls during the same timeframe. It is predominantly a harvest festival.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: In some villages in south India, especially Karnataka, a festival called "Okhali" or "Okhli" is celebrated in which every household keeps a barrel of water mixed with chalk and turmeric to throw on passers-by. The date of Okhali coincides with that of Songkran in Thailand and Thingyan in Myanmar, not with the dates of Holi, which is a north Indian festival.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Songkran is celebrated annually on the U.S. territory of Wake Island by Air Force members and American and Thai contractors.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Songkran occurs at the same time as that given by Bede for festivals of Eostre—and Easter weekend occasionally coincides with Songkran (most recently 1979, 1990, and 2001, but not again until 2063.)


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: Police statistics show that the death toll from road accidents doubles during the annual Songkran holiday. Between 2009 and 2013 there were about 27 road deaths per day during non-holiday periods and an average of 52 road deaths per day during Songkran. Thailand has the second-highest traffic fatality rate in the world, with 44 deaths per 100,000 residents. Approximately 70–80 percent of the accidents that occur during the long holiday period are motorcycle accidents. About 10,000 people per year die in motorcycle accidents.


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: The National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) says a total of 110,909 people were arrested and 5,772 vehicles impounded at road safety checkpoints across the country between 9–16 April 2016. In 2018 the number of offenders arrested at 2,029 checkpoints had risen to 146,589. Of these, 39,572 had failed to wear crash helmets and 37,779 carried no driving licence. Reacting to the numbers, the prime minister "ordered stricter enforcement of the law"; the interior minister said he would "propose greater efforts in raising awareness as an additional measure, insisting that traffic laws were [already] strictly enforced"; and deputy prime minister Prawit Wongsuwan said he would "work harder to ensure motorcyclists wore helmets."


title: Songkran (Thailand)

text: In 2014 "Celebrate Singapore," a large two-day Songkran-style water festival, was planned for Singapore and the event was promoted as the "largest water festival party in Singapore". However, controversy emerged when the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) Deputy Governor for Tourism Products, Vilaiwan Twichasri, claimed that Thailand holds exclusive rights to celebrate Songkran and planned to consult with officials at the Department of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Culture to discuss a potential lawsuit. The Deputy Governor's view was supported by numerous Thai citizens on social media websites. Chai Nakhonchai, Cultural Promotion Department chief, pointed out that Songkran is a traditional festival shared by many countries throughout Southeast Asia, while historian Charnvit Kasetsiri stated that no single nation can claim ownership of a tradition. On 25 March 2014, the "Bangkok Post" reported that the Singaporean government had intervened in the festival's content and there would be no water-throwing, no water pistols and no public drinking. The festival was also reduced to a one-day event.


title: 21-gun salute

text: A 21-gun salute is the most commonly recognized of the customary gun salutes that are performed by the firing of cannons or artillery as a military honor. As naval customs evolved, 21 guns came to be fired for heads of state, or in exceptional circumstances for heads of government, with the number decreasing with the rank of the recipient of the honor. While the 21-gun salute is the most commonly recognized, the number of rounds fired in any given salute will vary depending on the conditions. Circumstances affecting these variations include the particular occasion and, in the case of military and state funerals, the branch of service, and rank (or office) of the person to whom honors are being rendered.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The custom stems from naval tradition in the sixteenth century, when a warship entering a foreign port would fire each of its cannons while still out of range of targets. Since cannons then required a considerable time to reload, the ship was effectively disarmed, signifying the lack of hostile intent. In the earliest days, seven guns was the recognized British national salute because seven was the standard number of weapons on a vessel. In those days, gunpowder made from sodium nitrate was easier to keep on dry land than at sea. The early regulations stated that although a ship would fire only seven guns, the forts ashore would fire three shots to each one shot afloat, hence the number 21.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The prime minister, heads of foreign missions, foreign heads of government, and the Vice President of the United States are entitled to a 19-gun salute.


title: 21-gun salute

text: A 17-gun salute is given to the Canadian Minister of National Defence when visiting a saluting station (limited to once a year), as well as foreign ministers of defence.


title: 21-gun salute

text: Before they were abolished in 1968 by the Trudeau government, royal salutes were fired in Ottawa, the provincial capitals, and Montreal and Vancouver also on the Queen's Accession Day (6 February), the Queen's actual birthday (21 April), the Queen's Coronation Day (2 June), the Birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh (10 June), and the Birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (4 August).


title: 21-gun salute

text: The day after the birth of Princess Benedikte in 1944 which took place during Nazi Germany's Occupation of Denmark, members of the Danish resistance group Holger Danske performed a salute of 21 bombs in the Ørstedsparken public park in central Copenhagen as a reference to the traditional 21-gun salute performed at the occasion of royal births.


title: 21-gun salute

text: A 21-gun salute was used during the Parade of the Pharaohs (also called the Golden Parade) on April 3, 2021, when the mummies of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs were transferred to their new museum in Giza. Most of the mummies belonged to the New Kingdom period, which ruled Egypt between 1539 BC to 1075 BC. A 21-gun salute was used during the funeral of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2020. A 21 gun salute was used after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was sworn in on 8 June 2014. A final 21-gun salute was also fired to honor King Farouk prior to his embarking on the yacht "Mahrousa" that brought him to exile in Italy in 1952.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The 21-gun salute is accorded to the French president, forming part of his "military honors" ("honneurs militaires"). The salute is given during the inauguration ceremony (by two 75mm guns) and during naval visits. These honors are extended to foreign heads of state during state visits.


title: 21-gun salute

text: During the British Raj, India developed a formal hierarchical system of gun salutes. At the time of Indian independence in 1947, the hierarchy of salutes within British India stood as follows:


title: 21-gun salute

text: Prior to Indian independence in 1947, the Viceroy of India received a unique viceregal salute of 31 guns. After 1947, the 31-gun salute was retained for honouring the Governor-General of India (1947–1950).


title: 21-gun salute

text: In Indonesia, the 21-gun salute is done during state visits of foreign heads of state visiting Indonesia.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The modified 17-gun salute is executed during the commemoration of the precise seconds of the proclamation of the independence of Indonesia on the 17 of August at 10:00 near the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta. It is also done in other cities in Indonesia during the independence day commemoration ceremonies. See the 17-gun salute in Indonesia here: Indonesian Independence Day 17-gun salute


title: 21-gun salute

text: In Israel the practice of gun salute has been eliminated due to the country having "suffered many terror attacks".


title: 21-gun salute

text: A 21-gun salute is carried out for National Day Parades in Singapore by the Singapore Artillery during the presidential inspection of parade contingents.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In a rare occurrence, the 21-gun salute was given to the former Prime Minister and founding leader Lee Kuan Yew during his state funeral.


title: 21-gun salute

text: Traditionally, the Sri Lanka Navy accords a 25-gun salute to the nation on the National day, which is 4 February each year. The salute is fired from the ceremonial naval gun battery at Colombo Lighthouse - a tradition inherited from prior British influence. It began with HMCyS Vijaya of the Royal Ceylon Navy, the first warship of the navy according a 25-gun salute on 4 February 1951 with its single 4-inch gun.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The number of rounds fired in a salute depends on the place and occasion. The basic salute is 21 rounds. In Hyde Park and Green Park an extra 20 rounds are added because they are Royal Parks. At the Tower of London 62 rounds are fired on royal anniversaries (the basic 21, plus a further 20 because the Tower is a Royal Palace and Fortress, plus another 21 'for the City of London') and 41 on other occasions. The Tower of London probably holds the record for the most rounds fired in a single salute – 124 were fired when the Duke of Edinburgh's birthday (62 rounds) coincided with the Saturday designated as the Queen's official birthday (also 62 rounds).


title: 21-gun salute

text: On 10 April 2021, a 41-gun salute was fired to mark the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, with the timing changed from 1 round every 10 seconds to 1 round every minute, resulting in a total duration of 41 minutes for the salute.


title: 21-gun salute

text: When Queen Elizabeth II died, a 96-gun salute was fired to represent the years of Her Majesty's life.


title: 21-gun salute

text: The practice of firing one gun for each state in the union was not officially authorized until 1810, when the United States Department of War declared the number of rounds fired in the "National Salute" to be equivalent to the number of states, which at the time was 17. The tradition continued until 1841 when it was reduced from 26 to 21.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In 1842, the United States declared the 21-gun salute as its "Presidential Salute". While the "National Salute" had been formally established as the 21-gun salute, the current tradition holds the salute on Independence Day to be a 50 rounds—one round for each state in the union. This 'Salute to the Nation' is fired at noon on 4 July, on U.S. military installations. The U.S. Navy recognizes Presidents' Day and Memorial Day with a 21-gun salute at 1200.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In April 1914, during the Mexican Revolution, the Tampico Affair occurred, and escalated as a result of a twenty-one gun salute (or more specifically, the lack of one). Nine unarmed U.S. sailors were arrested in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, for entering an off-limit area at a fuel loading station. Despite them being released, the U.S. Naval commander demanded an apology and a twenty-one gun salute. The apology was provided, but not the salute, giving President Woodrow Wilson reason to order the U.S. occupation of the port of Veracruz.


title: 21-gun salute

text: A U.S. presidential death also involves 21-gun salutes and other military traditions. On the day after the death of the president, a former president or president-elect—unless this day falls on a Sunday or holiday, in which case the honor will be rendered the following day—the commanders of Army installations with the necessary personnel and material traditionally order that one gun be fired every half-hour, beginning at reveille and ending at retreat.


title: 21-gun salute

text: On the day of burial, a 21-minute gun salute traditionally is fired starting at noon at all military installations with the necessary personnel and material. Guns will be fired at one-minute intervals. Also on the day of burial, those installations will fire a 50-gun salute—one round for each state—at five-second intervals immediately following lowering of the flag.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In the song "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)" by AC/DC, 21-gun salutes are mentioned, including the use of Napoleonic cannons.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In the animated tv-series "Archer", his fictional father "Blackjack" is given a 21-gun salute by a group of ROTC students who were donated $600 by his mother Malory Archer.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In the film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", when the Grandfather sings "Posh" whilst dangling from a hot air balloon, there is a line "they 21 gun salute me".


title: 21-gun salute

text: Boston-based Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys recorded the song "21 Guitar Salute" (originally by The Press) on their 2002 split EP "Face to Face vs. Dropkick Murphys".


title: 21-gun salute

text: The 21-gun salute are also mentioned in the song "Methods to your Madness" by heavy metal band Metal Church.


title: 21-gun salute

text: British grime artist Stormzy included a song titled "21 Gun Salute" on his debut album "Gang Signs & Prayer".


title: 21-gun salute

text: The 2000 U.S. Open Golf Championship, held at the famed Pebble Beach Golf Links, saw a unique twist on the 21-gun salute. The tournament's defending champion, Payne Stewart, had died in a plane crash the previous October. Before the tournament began, a ceremony was held in Stewart's memory in which 21 golfers lined up on the 18th fairway and hit drives into the Pacific Ocean.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In the C. S. Forester novel "The Happy Return", the megalomaniacal rebel leader El Supremo demands to be honoured with a 23-gun salute. When informed that even a king only receives a 21-gun salute, he declares this is why he deserves a greater one.


title: 21-gun salute

text: In "Despicable Me 2", the Minions perform a “21 fart-gun salute” to honor the departing Doctor Nefario, although it was actually a three-volley salute.


title: Rahul Dev

text: Rahul Dev (born 27 September 1968) is an Indian actor and former model who predominantly works in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam language films and few Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Punjabi and Odia flims.


title: Rahul Dev

text: Rahul Dev and his brother Mukul Dev both are sons of Hari Dev who was an Assistant Commissioner of Police.


title: Rahul Dev

text: He made his screen debut in the 2000 film "Champion" where he played a villainous role for which he was nominated for the 2001 Filmfare Best Villain Award. He also appeared as a villain in the Punjabi movie "Dharti" in 2011. He then moved into Malayalam cinema, playing the role of an assassin Sheik Imran in Amal Neerad's "Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded". Four years later, he made a comeback with "Sringaravelan".


title: Rahul Dev

text: In December 2013, Dev made his television debut, playing the role of the demon Arunasur in the mythological TV series "Devon Ke Dev...Mahadev". He Participated in Bigg Boss (Hindi season 10) and Evicted in Day 63. He appeared in Bhojpuri film "Dulhan Chahi Pakistan Se 2" in 2018. Rahul will soon be seen sharing screen space with Aftab in the upcoming crime thriller web series Poison 2.


title: Rahul Dev

text: Dev's wife Rina died of cancer on 16 May 2009. The couple had been married for 11 years and have a son, Sidhart. Dev has spoken about the experience of being a single father. He is in a relationship with model and actress Mugdha Godse.


title: Rahul Dev

text: On 22 April 2019, his father, Hari Dev, who was an assistant commissioner of police died at the age of 91.


title: File format

text: A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free.


title: File format

text: Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped images using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata. A text file can contain any stream of characters, including possible control characters, and is encoded in one of various character encoding schemes. Some file formats, such as HTML, scalable vector graphics, and the source code of computer software are text files with defined syntaxes that allow them to be used for specific purposes.


title: File format

text: File formats often have a published specification describing the encoding method and enabling testing of program intended functionality. Not all formats have freely available specification documents, partly because some developers view their specification documents as trade secrets, and partly because other developers never author a formal specification document, letting precedent set by other already existing programs that use the format define the format via how these existing programs use it.


title: File format

text: If the developer of a format doesn't publish free specifications, another developer looking to utilize that kind of file must either reverse engineer the file to find out how to read it or acquire the specification document from the format's developers for a fee and by signing a non-disclosure agreement. The latter approach is possible only when a formal specification document exists. Both strategies require significant time, money, or both; therefore, file formats with publicly available specifications tend to be supported by more programs.


title: File format

text: Patent law, rather than copyright, is more often used to protect a file format. Although patents for file formats are not directly permitted under US law, some formats encode data using patented algorithms. For example, using compression with the GIF file format requires the use of a patented algorithm, and though the patent owner did not initially enforce their patent, they later began collecting royalty fees. This has resulted in a significant decrease in the use of GIFs, and is partly responsible for the development of the alternative PNG format. However, the GIF patent expired in the US in mid-2003, and worldwide in mid-2004.


title: File format

text: Different operating systems have traditionally taken different approaches to determining a particular file's format, with each approach having its own advantages and disadvantages. Most modern operating systems and individual applications need to use all of the following approaches to read "foreign" file formats, if not work with them completely.


title: File format

text: One popular method used by many operating systems, including Windows, macOS, CP/M, DOS, VMS, and VM/CMS, is to determine the format of a file based on the end of its name, more specifically the letters following the final period. This portion of the filename is known as the filename extension. For example, HTML documents are identified by names that end with (or ), and GIF images by . In the original FAT file system, file names were limited to an eight-character identifier and a three-character extension, known as an 8.3 filename. There are a limited number of three-letter extensions, which can cause a given extension to be used by more than one program. Many formats still use three-character extensions even though modern operating systems and application programs no longer have this limitation. Since there is no standard list of extensions, more than one format can use the same extension, which can confuse both the operating system and users.


title: File format

text: One artifact of this approach is that the system can easily be tricked into treating a file as a different format simply by renaming it — an HTML file can, for instance, be easily treated as plain text by renaming it from to . Although this strategy was useful to expert users who could easily understand and manipulate this information, it was often confusing to less technical users, who could accidentally make a file unusable (or "lose" it) by renaming it incorrectly.


title: File format

text: This led most versions of Windows and Mac OS to hide the extension when listing files. This prevents the user from accidentally changing the file type, and allows expert users to turn this feature off and display the extensions.


title: File format

text: Hiding the extension, however, can create the appearance of two or more identical filenames in the same folder. For example, a company logo may be needed both in format (for publishing) and format (for web sites). With the extensions visible, these would appear as the unique filenames: "" and "". On the other hand, hiding the extensions would make both appear as "", which can lead to confusion.


title: File format

text: Hiding extensions can also pose a security risk. For example, a malicious user could create an executable program with an innocent name such as "". The "" would be hidden and an unsuspecting user would see "", which would appear to be a JPEG image, usually unable to harm the machine. However, the operating system would still see the "" extension and run the program, which would then be able to cause harm to the computer. The same is true with files with only one extension: as it is not shown to the user, no information about the file can be deduced without explicitly investigating the file. To further trick users, it is possible to store an icon inside the program, in which case some operating systems' icon assignment for the executable file () would be overridden with an icon commonly used to represent JPEG images, making the program look like an image. Extensions can also be spoofed: some Microsoft Word macro viruses create a Word file in template format and save it with a extension. Since Word generally ignores extensions and looks at the format of the file, these would open as templates, execute, and spread the virus. This represents a practical problem for Windows systems where extension-hiding is turned on by default.


title: File format

text: A second way to identify a file format is to "use information" regarding the format stored inside the file itself, either information meant for this purpose or binary strings that happen to always be in specific locations in files of some formats. Since the easiest place to locate them is at the beginning, such area is usually called a "file header" when it is greater than a few bytes, or a "magic number" if it is just a few bytes long.


title: File format

text: The metadata contained in a file header are usually stored at the start of the file, but might be present in other areas too, often including the end, depending on the file format or the type of data contained. Character-based (text) files usually have character-based headers, whereas binary formats usually have binary headers, although this is not a rule. Text-based file headers usually take up more space, but being human-readable, they can easily be examined by using simple software such as a text editor or a hexadecimal editor.


title: File format

text: As well as identifying the file format, file headers may contain metadata about the file and its contents. For example, most image files store information about image format, size, resolution and color space, and optionally authoring information such as who made the image, when and where it was made, what camera model and photographic settings were used (Exif), and so on. Such metadata may be used by software reading or interpreting the file during the loading process and afterwards.


title: File format

text: File headers may be used by an operating system to quickly gather information about a file without loading it all into memory, but doing so uses more of a computer's resources than reading directly from the directory information. For instance, when a graphic file manager has to display the contents of a folder, it must read the headers of many files before it can display the appropriate icons, but these will be located in different places on the storage medium thus taking longer to access. A folder containing many files with complex metadata such as thumbnail information may require considerable time before it can be displayed.


title: File format

text: If a header is binary hard-coded such that the header itself needs complex interpretation in order to be recognized, especially for metadata content protection's sake, there is a risk that the file format can be misinterpreted. It may even have been badly written at the source. This can result in corrupt metadata which, in extremely bad cases, might even render the file unreadable.


title: File format

text: One way to incorporate file type metadata, often associated with Unix and its derivatives, is to store a "magic number" inside the file itself. Originally, this term was used for a specific set of 2-byte identifiers at the beginnings of files, but since any binary sequence can be regarded as a number, any feature of a file format which uniquely distinguishes it can be used for identification. GIF images, for instance, always begin with the ASCII representation of either or , depending upon the standard to which they adhere. Many file types, especially plain-text files, are harder to spot by this method. HTML files, for example, might begin with the string (which is not case sensitive), or an appropriate document type definition that starts with , or, for XHTML, the XML identifier, which begins with . The files can also begin with HTML comments, random text, or several empty lines, but still be usable HTML.


title: File format

text: The magic number approach offers better guarantees that the format will be identified correctly, and can often determine more precise information about the file. Since reasonably reliable "magic number" tests can be fairly complex, and each file must effectively be tested against every possibility in the magic database, this approach is relatively inefficient, especially for displaying large lists of files (in contrast, file name and metadata-based methods need to check only one piece of data, and match it against a sorted index). Also, data must be read from the file itself, increasing latency as opposed to metadata stored in the directory. Where file types don't lend themselves to recognition in this way, the system must fall back to metadata. It is, however, the best way for a program to check if the file it has been told to process is of the correct format: while the file's name or metadata may be altered independently of its content, failing a well-designed magic number test is a pretty sure sign that the file is either corrupt or of the wrong type. On the other hand, a valid magic number does not guarantee that the file is not corrupt or is of a correct type.


title: File format

text: So-called shebang lines in script files are a special case of magic numbers. Here, the magic number is human-readable text that identifies a specific command interpreter and options to be passed to the command interpreter.


title: File format

text: Another operating system using magic numbers is AmigaOS, where magic numbers were called "Magic Cookies" and were adopted as a standard system to recognize executables in Hunk executable file format and also to let single programs, tools and utilities deal automatically with their saved data files, or any other kind of file types when saving and loading data. This system was then enhanced with the Amiga standard Datatype recognition system. Another method was the FourCC method, originating in OSType on Macintosh, later adapted by Interchange File Format (IFF) and derivatives.


title: File format

text: A final way of storing the format of a file is to explicitly store information about the format in the file system, rather than within the file itself.


title: File format

text: This approach keeps the metadata separate from both the main data and the name, but is also less portable than either filename extensions or "magic numbers", since the format has to be converted from filesystem to filesystem. While this is also true to an extent with filename extensions— for instance, for compatibility with MS-DOS's three character limit— most forms of storage have a roughly equivalent definition of a file's data and name, but may have varying or no representation of further metadata.


title: File format

text: Note that zip files or archive files solve the problem of handling metadata. A utility program collects multiple files together along with metadata about each file and the folders/directories they came from all within one new file (e.g. a zip file with extension ). The new file is also compressed and possibly encrypted, but now is transmissible as a single file across operating systems by FTP transmissions or sent by email as an attachment. At the destination, the single file received has to be unzipped by a compatible utility to be useful. The problems of handling metadata are solved this way using zip files or archive files.


title: File format

text: The Mac OS' Hierarchical File System stores codes for "creator" and "type" as part of the directory entry for each file. These codes are referred to as OSTypes. These codes could be any 4-byte sequence but were often selected so that the ASCII representation formed a sequence of meaningful characters, such as an abbreviation of the application's name or the developer's initials. For instance a HyperCard "stack" file has a "creator" of (from Hypercard's previous name, "WildCard") and a "type" of . The BBEdit text editor has a creator code of referring to its original programmer, Rich Siegel. The type code specifies the format of the file, while the creator code specifies the default program to open it with when double-clicked by the user. For example, the user could have several text files all with the type code of , but each open in a different program, due to having differing creator codes. This feature was intended so that, for example, human-readable plain-text files could be opened in a general-purpose text editor, while programming or HTML code files would open in a specialized editor or IDE. However, this feature was often the source of user confusion, as which program would launch when the files were double-clicked was often unpredictable. RISC OS uses a similar system, consisting of a 12-bit number which can be looked up in a table of descriptions—e.g. the hexadecimal number is "aliased" to , representing a PostScript file.


title: File format

text: A Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) is a method used in macOS for uniquely identifying "typed" classes of entities, such as file formats. It was developed by Apple as a replacement for OSType (type & creator codes).


title: File format

text: The UTI is a Core Foundation string, which uses a reverse-DNS string. Some common and standard types use a domain called (e.g. for a Portable Network Graphics image), while other domains can be used for third-party types (e.g. for Portable Document Format). UTIs can be defined within a hierarchical structure, known as a conformance hierarchy. Thus, conforms to a supertype of , which itself conforms to a supertype of . A UTI can exist in multiple hierarchies, which provides great flexibility.


title: File format

text: In addition to file formats, UTIs can also be used for other entities which can exist in macOS, including:


title: File format

text: The HPFS, FAT12, and FAT16 (but not FAT32) filesystems allow the storage of "extended attributes" with files. These comprise an arbitrary set of triplets with a name, a coded type for the value, and a value, where the names are unique and values can be up to 64 KB long. There are standardized meanings for certain types and names (under OS/2). One such is that the ".TYPE" extended attribute is used to determine the file type. Its value comprises a list of one or more file types associated with the file, each of which is a string, such as "Plain Text" or "HTML document". Thus a file may have several types.


title: File format

text: The NTFS filesystem also allows storage of OS/2 extended attributes, as one of the file "forks", but this feature is merely present to support the OS/2 subsystem (not present in XP), so the Win32 subsystem treats this information as an opaque block of data and does not use it. Instead, it relies on other file forks to store meta-information in Win32-specific formats. OS/2 extended attributes can still be read and written by Win32 programs, but the data must be entirely parsed by applications.


title: File format

text: On Unix and Unix-like systems, the ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS version 3, XFS, JFS, FFS, and HFS+ filesystems allow the storage of extended attributes with files. These include an arbitrary list of "name=value" strings, where the names are unique and a value can be accessed through its related name.


title: File format

text: The PRONOM Persistent Unique Identifier (PUID) is an extensible scheme of persistent, unique, and unambiguous identifiers for file formats, which has been developed by The National Archives of the UK as part of its PRONOM technical registry service. PUIDs can be expressed as Uniform Resource Identifiers using the namespace. Although not yet widely used outside of the UK government and some digital preservation programs, the PUID scheme does provide greater granularity than most alternative schemes.


title: File format

text: MIME types are widely used in many Internet-related applications, and increasingly elsewhere, although their usage for on-disc type information is rare. These consist of a standardised system of identifiers (managed by IANA) consisting of a "type" and a "sub-type", separated by a slash—for instance, or . These were originally intended as a way of identifying what type of file was attached to an e-mail, independent of the source and target operating systems. MIME types identify files on BeOS, AmigaOS 4.0 and MorphOS, as well as store unique application signatures for application launching. In AmigaOS and MorphOS, the Mime type system works in parallel with Amiga specific Datatype system.


title: File format

text: There are problems with the MIME types though; several organizations and people have created their own MIME types without registering them properly with IANA, which makes the use of this standard awkward in some cases.


title: File format

text: File format identifiers are another, not widely used way to identify file formats according to their origin and their file category. It was created for the Description Explorer suite of software. It is composed of several digits of the form . The first part indicates the organization origin/maintainer (this number represents a value in a company/standards organization database), and the 2 following digits categorize the type of file in hexadecimal. The final part is composed of the usual filename extension of the file or the international standard number of the file, padded left with zeros. For example, the PNG file specification has the FFID of where indicates an image file, is the standard number and indicates the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).


title: File format

text: Another but less popular way to identify the file format is to examine the file contents for distinguishable patterns among file types. The contents of a file are a sequence of bytes and a byte has 256 unique permutations (0–255). Thus, counting the occurrence of byte patterns that is often referred to as byte frequency distribution gives distinguishable patterns to identify file types. There are many content-based file type identification schemes that use a byte frequency distribution to build the representative models for file type and use any statistical and data mining techniques to identify file types


title: File format

text: There are several types of ways to structure data in a file. The most usual ones are described below.


title: File format

text: Earlier file formats used raw data formats that consisted of directly dumping the memory images of one or more structures into the file.


title: File format

text: This has several drawbacks. Unless the memory images also have reserved spaces for future extensions, extending and improving this type of structured file is very difficult. It also creates files that might be specific to one platform or programming language (for example a structure containing a Pascal string is not recognized as such in C). On the other hand, developing tools for reading and writing these types of files is very simple.


title: File format

text: The limitations of the unstructured formats led to the development of other types of file formats that could be easily extended and be backward compatible at the same time.


title: File format

text: In this kind of file structure, each piece of data is embedded in a container that somehow identifies the data. The container's scope can be identified by start- and end-markers of some kind, by an explicit length field somewhere, or by fixed requirements of the file format's definition.


title: File format

text: Throughout the 1970s, many programs used formats of this general kind. For example, word-processors such as troff, Script, and Scribe, and database export files such as CSV. Electronic Arts and Commodore-Amiga also used this type of file format in 1985, with their IFF (Interchange File Format) file format.


title: File format

text: A container is sometimes called a ""chunk"", although "chunk" may also imply that each piece is small, and/or that chunks do not contain other chunks; many formats do not impose those requirements.


title: File format

text: The information that identifies a particular "chunk" may be called many different things, often terms including "field name", "identifier", "label", or "tag". The identifiers are often human-readable, and classify parts of the data: for example, as a "surname", "address", "rectangle", "font name", etc. These are not the same thing as identifiers in the sense of a database key or serial number (although an identifier may well identify its associated data as such a key).


title: File format

text: With this type of file structure, tools that do not know certain chunk identifiers simply skip those that they do not understand. Depending on the


title: File format

text: actual meaning of the skipped data, this may or may not be useful (CSS explicitly defines such behavior).


title: File format

text: This concept has been used again and again by RIFF (Microsoft-IBM equivalent of IFF), PNG, JPEG storage, DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) encoded streams and files (which were originally described in CCITT X.409:1984 and therefore predate IFF), and Structured Data Exchange Format (SDXF).


title: File format

text: Indeed, any data format must somehow identify the significance of its component parts, and embedded boundary-markers are an obvious way to do so:


title: File format

text: This is another extensible format, that closely resembles a file system (OLE Documents are actual filesystems), where the file is composed of 'directory entries' that contain the location of the data within the file itself as well as its signatures (and in certain cases its type). Good examples of these types of file structures are disk images, executables, OLE documents TIFF, libraries.


title: File format

text: The structure of a directory-based file format lends itself to modifications more easily than unstructured or chunk-based formats. The nature of this type of format allows users to carefully construct files that causes reader software to do things the authors of the format never intended to happen. An example of this is the zip bomb. Directory-based file formats also use values that point at other areas in the file but if some later data value points back at data that was read earlier, it can result in an infinite loop for any reader software that assumes the input file is valid and blindly follows the loop.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island (; formerly Lord Howe's Island) is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, part of the Australian state of New South Wales. It lies directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, northeast of Sydney, and about southwest of Norfolk Island. It is about long and between wide with an area of , though just of that comprise the low-lying developed part of the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Along the west coast is a sandy semi-enclosed sheltered coral reef lagoon. Most of the population lives in the north, while the south is dominated by forested hills rising to the highest point on the island, Mount Gower (). The Lord Howe Island Group comprises 28 islands, islets, and rocks. Apart from Lord Howe Island itself, the most notable of these is the volcanic and uninhabited Ball's Pyramid about to the southeast of Howe. To the north lies a cluster of seven small uninhabited islands called the Admiralty Group.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The first reported sighting of Lord Howe Island took place on 17 February 1788, when Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the Armed Tender HMS "Supply", was en route from Botany Bay to found a penal settlement on Norfolk Island. On the return journey, Ball sent a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession. It subsequently became a provisioning port for the whaling industry, and was permanently settled in June 1834. When whaling declined, the 1880s saw the beginning of the worldwide export of the endemic kentia palms, which remains a key component of the island's economy. The other continuing industry, tourism, began after World War II ended in 1945.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The Lord Howe Island Group is part of the state of New South Wales and is regarded legally as an unincorporated area administered by the Lord Howe Island Board, which reports to the New South Wales Minister for Environment and Heritage. The island's standard time zone is , or UTC+11 when daylight saving time applies. The currency is the Australian dollar. Commuter airlines provide flights to Sydney, Brisbane, and Port Macquarie.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: UNESCO records the Lord Howe Island Group as a World Heritage Site of global natural significance. Most of the island is virtually untouched forest, with many of the plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Other natural attractions include the diversity of the landscapes, the variety of upper mantle and oceanic basalts, the world's southernmost barrier coral reef, nesting seabirds, and the rich historical and cultural heritage. The Lord Howe Island Act 1981 established a "Permanent Park Preserve" (covering about 70% of the island). The island was added to the Australian National Heritage List on 21 May 2007 and the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. The surrounding waters are a protected region designated the Lord Howe Island Marine Park.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island is part of the IBRA region Pacific Subtropical Islands (code PSI) and is subregion PSI01 with an area of . In the WWF ecoregion system, Lord Howe Island constitutes the entirety of the 'Lord Howe Island subtropical forests' ecoregion (WWF ID#AA0109). This ecoregion is in the Australasian realm, and the tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome. The WWF ecoregion has an area of 14 km.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Prior to European discovery and settlement, Lord Howe Island apparently was uninhabited, and unknown to Polynesian peoples of the South Pacific. No evidence to suggest prehistoric human activity has ever been found on Lord Howe Island, even after an extensive archaeological investigation in 1996. In "Australian Archaeology" Atholl Anderson concluded in 2003 that, "the case for no pre-European settlement on Lord Howe Island is now more compelling than before" and that "the absence of pre-European settlement on Lord Howe Island is not easily explained. At 16 km it is twice the size of Pitcairn Island and half the size of Norfolk Island, two other remote subtropical islands that were inhabited prehistorically, and it had a biota very similar to that of Norfolk Island."


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The first reported European sighting of Lord Howe Island was on 17 February 1788 by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of the Armed Tender (the oldest and smallest of the First Fleet ships), which was on its way from Botany Bay with a cargo of nine male and six female convicts to found a penal settlement on Norfolk Island. On the return journey of 13 March 1788, Ball observed Ball's Pyramid and sent a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession. Numerous turtles and tame birds were captured and returned to Sydney. Ball named Mount Lidgbird and Ball's Pyramid after himself and the main island after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Many names on the island date from this time, and also from May of the same year, when four ships of the First Fleet, , , "Lady Penrhyn" and , visited it. Much of the plant and animal life was first recorded in the journals and diaries of visitors such as David Blackburn, Master of "Supply", and Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon of the "Lady Penrhyn".


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Smyth was in Sydney when the "Supply" returned from the first voyage to Norfolk Island. His journal entry for 19 March 1788 noted that "the "Supply", in her return, landed at the island she [discovered] in going out, and all were very agreeably surprised to find great numbers of fine turtle on the beach and, on the land amongst the trees, great numbers of fowls very like a guinea hen, and another species of fowl not unlike the landrail in England, and all so perfectly tame that you could frequently take hold of them with your hands but could, at all times, knock down as many as you thought proper, with a short stick. Inside the reef also there were fish innumerable, which were so easily taken with a hook and line as to be able to catch a boat full in a short time. She brought thirteen large turtle to Port Jackson and many were distributed among the camp and fleet."


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Watercolour sketches of native birds including the Lord Howe woodhen ("Gallirallus sylvestris"), white gallinule ("Porphyrio albus"), and Lord Howe pigeon ("Columba vitiensis godmanae"), were made by artists including George Raper and John Hunter. As the latter two birds were soon hunted to extinction, these paintings are their only remaining pictorial record. Over the next three years, the "Supply" returned to the island several times in search of turtles, and the island was also visited by ships of the Second and Third Fleets. Between 1789 and 1791, the Pacific whale industry was born with British and American whaling ships chasing sperm whales ("Physeter macrocephalus") along the equator to the Gilbert and Ellice archipelago, then south into Australian and New Zealand waters. The American fleet numbered 675 ships and Lord Howe was located in a region known as the Middle Ground noted for sperm whales and southern right whales ("Eubalaena australis").


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The island was subsequently visited by many government and whaling ships sailing between New South Wales and Norfolk Island and across the Pacific, including many from the American whaling fleet, so its reputation as a provisioning port preceded settlement, with some ships leaving goats and pigs on the island as food for future visitors. Between July and October 1791, the Third Fleet ships arrived at Sydney and within days, the deckwork was being reconstructed for a future in the lucrative whaling industry. Whale oil was to become Australia's most profitable export until the 1830s, and the whaling industry shaped Lord Howe Island's early history.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Permanent settlement on Lord Howe was established in June 1834, when the British whaling barque "Caroline", sailing from New Zealand and commanded by Captain John Blinkenthorpe, landed at what is now known as Blinky Beach. They left three men, George Ashdown, James Bishop, and Chapman, who were employed by a Sydney whaling firm to establish a supply station. The men were initially to provide meat by fishing and by raising pigs and goats from feral stock. They landed with (or acquired from a visiting ship) their Māori wives and two Māori boys. Huts were built in an area now known as Old Settlement, which had a supply of fresh water, and a garden was established west of Blinky Beach.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: This was a cashless society; the settlers bartered their stores of water, wood, vegetables, meat, fish, and bird feathers for clothes, tea, sugar, tools, tobacco, and other commodities not available on the island, but it was the whalers' valuation that had to be accepted. These first settlers eventually left the island when they were bought out for £350 in September 1841 by businessmen Owen Poole and Richard Dawson (later joined by John Foulis), whose employees and others then settled on the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The new business was advertised and ships trading between Sydney and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) would also put into the island. "Rover's Bride", a small cutter, became the first regular trading vessel. Between 1839 and 1859, five to 12 ships made landfall each year, occasionally closer to 20, with seven or eight at a time laying off the reef. In 1842 and 1844, the first children were born on the island. Then in 1847, Poole, Dawson, and Foulis, bitter at failing to obtain a land lease from the New South Wales government, abandoned the settlement although three of their employees remained. One family, the Andrews, after finding some onions on the beach in 1848, cultivated them as the "Lord Howe red onion", which was popular in the Southern Hemisphere for about 30 years until the crop was attacked by smut disease.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: In 1849, just 11 people were living on the island, but soon the island farms expanded. In the 1850s, gold was discovered on mainland Australia, where crews would abandon their ships, preferring to dig for gold than to risk their lives at sea. As a consequence, many vessels avoided the mainland and Lord Howe Island experienced an increasing trade, which peaked between 1855 and 1857. In 1851, about 16 people were living on the island. Vegetable crops now included potatoes, carrots, maize, pumpkin, taro, watermelon, and even grapes, passionfruit, and coffee. Between 1851 and 1853, several aborted proposals were made by the NSW government to establish a penal settlement on the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: From 1851 to 1854, Henry Denham captain of HMS "Herald", which was on a scientific expedition to the southwest Pacific (1852–1856), completed the island's first hydrographic survey. On board were three Scottish biologists, William Milne (a gardener-botanist from the Edinburgh Botanic Garden), John MacGillivray (naturalist) who collected fish and plant specimens, and assistant surgeon and zoologist Denis Macdonald. Together, these men established much basic information on the geology, flora, and fauna of the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Around 1853, a further three settlers arrived on the American whaling barque "Belle", captained by Ichabod Handy. George Campbell (who died in 1856) and Jack Brian (who left the island in 1854) arrived, and the third, Nathan Thompson, brought three women (called Botanga, Bogoroo, and a girl named Bogue) from the Gilbert Islands. When his first wife Botanga died, he then married Bogue. Thompson was the first resident to build a substantial house in the 1860s from mainland cedar washed up on the beach. Most of the residents with island ancestors have blood relations or are connected by marriage to Thompson and his second wife Bogue.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: From the early 1860s, whaling declined rapidly with the increasing use of petroleum, the onset of the California Gold Rush, and the American Civil War—with unfortunate consequences for the island. To explore alternative means of income, Thompson, in 1867, purchased the "Sylph", which was the first local vessel to trade with Sydney (mainly pigs and onions). It anchored in deep water at what is now Sylph's Hole off Old Settlement Beach, but was eventually tragically lost at sea in 1873, which added to the woes of the island at that time.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: In 1869, the island was visited by magistrate P. Cloete aboard the "Thetis" investigating a possible murder. He was accompanied by Charles Moore, director of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and his assistant William Carron, who forwarded plant specimens to Ferdinand Mueller at the botanic gardens in Melbourne, who by 1875, had catalogued and published 195 species. Also on the ship was William Fitzgerald, a surveyor, and Mr Masters from the Australian Museum. Together, they surveyed the island with the findings published in 1870 when the population was listed as 35 people, their 13 houses built of split palm battens thatched on the roof and sides with palm leaves. Around this time, a downturn of trade began with the demise of the whaling industry and sometimes six to 12 months passed without a vessel calling. With the provisions rotting in the storehouses, the older families lost interest in market gardening.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: From 1860 to 1872, 43 ships had collected provisions, but from 1873 to 1887, fewer than a dozen had done so. This prompted some activity from the mainland. In 1876, a government report on the island was submitted by surveyor William Fitzgerald based on a visit in the same year. He suggested that coffee be grown, but the kentia palm was already catching world attention. In 1878, the island was declared a forest reserve and Captain Richard Armstrong became the first resident government administrator. He encouraged schools, tree-planting, and the palm trade, dynamited the north passage to the lagoon, and built roads. He also managed to upset the residents, and parliamentarian Bowie Wilson was sent from the mainland in April 1882 to investigate the situation. With Wilson was a team of scientists who included H. Wilkinson from the Mines Department, W. Condor from the Survey Department, J. Duff from the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and A. Morton from the Australian Museum. J. Sharkey from the Government Printing Office took the earliest known photographs of the island and its residents. A full account of the island appeared in the report from this visit, which recommended that Armstrong be replaced. Meanwhile, the population had increased considerably and included 29 children; the report recommended that a schoolmaster be appointed. This study sealed a lasting relationship with three scientific organisations, the Australian Museum, Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, and Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: In 1883, the company Burns Philp started a regular shipping service and the number of tourists gradually increased. By 1932, with the regular tourist run of SS "Morinda", tourism became the second-largest source of external income after palm sales to Europe. "Morinda" was replaced by in 1932, and she in turn by other vessels. The service continues into the present day with the fortnightly Island Trader service from Port Macquarie.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The palm trade began in the 1880s when the lowland kentia palm ("Howea forsteriana") was first exported to Britain, Europe, and America, but the trade was only placed on a firm financial footing when the Lord Howe Island Kentia Palm Nursery was formed in 1906 (see below).


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The first plane to appear on the island was in 1931, when Francis Chichester alighted on the lagoon in a de Havilland Gipsy Moth converted into a floatplane. It was damaged there in an overnight storm, but repaired with the assistance of islanders and then took off successfully nine weeks later for a flight to Sydney. After World War II, in 1947, tourists arrived on Catalina and then four-engined Sandringham flying boats of Ansett Flying Boat Services operating out of Rose Bay, Sydney, and landing on the lagoon, the journey taking about 3½ hours. When Lord Howe Island Airport was completed in 1974, the seaplanes were eventually replaced with QantasLink twin-engined turboprop Dash 8–200 aircraft.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: In 2002, the Royal Navy destroyer struck Wolf Rock, a reef at Lord Howe Island, and almost sank. In recent times, tourism has increased and the government of New South Wales has been increasingly involved with issues of conservation.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: On 17 October 2011, a supply ship, M/V "Island Trader", with 20 tons of fuel, ran aground in the lagoon. The ship refloated at high tide with no loss of crew or cargo.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales, a public health order was issued on 22 March 2020 that declared Lord Howe Island a public risk area and directed restricted access. As of that date there were no known cases of COVID-19 on the Island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: One of the most contentious issues amongst islanders in the 21st century is what to do about the rodent situation. Rodents have only been on the island since the ran aground in 1918, and have wiped out several endemic bird species and were thought to have done the same to the Lord Howe Island stick insect. A plan in 2016 was made to drop 42 tonnes of rat bait across the island, but the community was heavily divided.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The island was due to be declared rodent-free in October 2021, two years after the last live rat was found, but a living male and pregnant female were discovered in April 2021. The eradication, contrary to many community reservations, has seen birds, insects and plants flourish at levels not seen in decades.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: As at the 2016 census, the resident population was 382 people, and the number of tourists was not allowed to exceed 400. Early settlers were European and American whalers and many of their offspring have remained on the island for more than six generations. Residents now work in the kentia palm industry, tourism, retail, some fishing, and farming. In 1876 on Sundays, games and labour were suspended, but no religious services were held. Nowadays, the area known locally as Church Paddock has Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Adventist churches, the religious affiliations on the island being 30% Anglican, 22% no religion, 18% Catholic and 12% Seventh Day Adventist. The ratio of the sexes is roughly equal, with 47% of the population in the age group 25–54 and 92% holding Australian citizenship.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Official control of Lord Howe Island lay initially with the British Crown until it passed to New South Wales in 1855, although until at least 1876, the islanders lived in "a relatively harmonious and self-regulating community". In 1878, Richard Armstrong was appointed administrator when the NSW Parliament declared the island a forest reserve, but as a result of ill feeling, and an enquiry, he was eventually removed from office on 31 May 1882 (he returned later that year though to view the transit of Venus from present-day Transit Hill). After his removal, the island was administered by four successive magistrates until 1913, when a Sydney-based board was formed; in 1948, a resident superintendent was appointed. In 1913, the three-man Lord Howe Island Board of Control was established, mostly to regulate the palm seed industry, but also administering the affairs of the island from Sydney until the present Lord Howe Island Board was set up in 1954.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The Lord Howe Island Board is a NSW Statutory Authority established under the Lord Howe Island Act 1953, to administer the island as part of the state of New South Wales. It reports directly to the state's Minister for Environment and Heritage, and is responsible for the care, control, and management of the island. Its duties include the protection of World Heritage values; the control of development; the administration of Crown Land, including the island's protected area; provision of community services and infrastructure; and regulating sustainable tourism. In 1981, the Lord Howe Island Amendment Act gave islanders the administrative power of three members on a five-member board. The board also manages the Lord Howe Island kentia palm nursery, which together with tourism, provides the island's only sources of external income. Under an amendment bill in 2004, the board now comprises seven members, four of whom are elected from the islander community, thus giving about 350 permanent residents a high level of autonomy. The remaining three members are appointed by the minister to represent the interests of business, tourism, and conservation. The full board meets on the island every three months, while the day-to-day affairs of the island are managed by the board's administration, with a permanent staff that had increased to 22 people by 1988.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Land tenure has been an issue since first settlement, as island residents repeatedly requested freehold title or an absolute gift of cultivated land. Original settlers were squatters. The granting of a lease to Richard Armstrong in 1878 drew complaints, and a few short-term leases ("permissive occupancies") were granted. In 1913, with the appointment of a board of control, permissive occupancies were revoked and the board itself given permissive occupancy of the island. Then the Lord Howe Island Act 1953 made all land the property of the Crown. Direct descendants of islanders with permissive occupancies in 1913 were granted perpetual leases on blocks up to for residential purposes. Short-term special leases were granted for larger areas used for agriculture, so in 1955, 55 perpetual leases and 43 special leases were granted. The 1981 amendment to the act extended political and land rights to all residents of 10 years or more. An active debate exists concerning the proportion of residents with tenure and the degree of influence on the board of resident islanders in relation to long-term planning for visitors, and issues relating to the environment, amenity, and global heritage.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: As a dependency of the Colony of New South Wales, Lord Howe Island was not represented in parliament until the 1894 New South Wales colonial election following the passage of the "Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Act, 1893". Since 1894, Lord Howe Island has been included in the following New South Wales Legislative Assembly districts:


title: Lord Howe Island

text: As part of the redistribution of electoral districts for the 2023 state election, a proposal was received to move Lord Howe Island back into the electorate of Sydney. However, the NSW Electoral Commission eventually decided to retain the island within the electorate of Port Macquarie.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Since 1901, Lord Howe Island has been included in the following Australian House of Representatives electoral divisions:


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The first exporter of palm seeds was Ned King, a mountain guide for the Fitzgerald surveys of 1869 and 1876, who sent seed to the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Overseas trade began in the 1880s, when one of the four palms endemic to the island, the kentia palm ("Howea forsteriana"), which grows naturally in the lowlands, was found to be ideally suited to the fashionable conservatories of the well-to-do in Britain, Europe, and the United States. The assistance of mainland magistrate, Frank Farnell, was needed to put the business on a sound commercial footing when in 1906, he became company director of the Lord Howe Island Kentia Palm Nursery, whose shareholders included 21 islanders and a Sydney-based seed company. However, the formation of the Lord Howe Island Board of Control was needed in 1913 to resolve outstanding issues.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The kentia palm (known locally as the thatch palm, as it was used to roof the houses of the early settlers) is popular worldwide as decorative palm that grows well both outdoors (in sufficiently warm climates) and indoors; the mild climate of the island has led to the evolution of a palm that can tolerate low light, a dry atmosphere and lowish temperatures — ideal for indoor conditions, particularly in higher-end venues such as hotel lobbies, galleries and large foyers where their high price (thanks to their relative rarity) is no disincentive to their use. Up until the 1980s the palms were only sold as seed but from then onwards only as high quality seedlings. The nursery received certification in 1997 for its high quality management complying with the requirements of Australian Standard AS/NZS ISO 9002.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Seed is gathered from both natural forest and plantations, most collectors being descendants of the original settlers. The seed is then germinated in soilless media and sealed from the atmosphere to prevent contamination. After testing, seedlings are picked, washed (bare-rooted), sanitized and certified, then packed and sealed into insulated containers for export. Nursery profits, in turn, are used in projects that enhance the island's ecosystems. The nursery plans to expand the business to include the curly palm ("Howea belmoreana") and other native plants of special interest.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: By the late 1980s, annual exports had begun to provide a revenue of over A$2 million, constituting the only major industry on the island apart from tourism.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island is known for its geology, birds, plants, and marine life. Popular tourist activities include scuba diving, birdwatching, snorkelling, surfing, kayaking, and fishing. To relieve pressure on the small island environment, only 400 tourists are permitted at any one time. The island is reached by plane from Sydney Airport or Brisbane Airport in less than two hours. The Permanent Park Preserve declared in 1981 has similar management guidelines to a national park.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: With fewer than 800 people on the island at any time, facilities are limited; they include a bakery, butcher, general store, liquor store, restaurants, post office, museum, and information centre, a police officer, a ranger, and an ATM at the bowling club. Stores are shipped to the island fortnightly by the "Island Trader" from Port Macquarie. The island has a small four-bed hospital and dispensary. A small botanic garden displays labelled local plants in its grounds. Diesel-generated power is 240 volts AC, complemented by 1.3 MW solar power and 3.7 MWh battery. No public transport or mobile phone coverage is available, but public telephones, fax facilities, and internet access are, as well as a local radio station and newsletter, "The Signal".


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Tourist accommodation ranges from luxury lodges to apartments and villa units. The currency is the Australian dollar, and there are two banks. No camping facilities are on the island and remote-area camping is not permitted. To protect the fragile environment of Ball's Pyramid (which carries the last remaining wild population of the endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect), recreational climbing there is prohibited. No pets are allowed without permission from the board. Islanders use tanked rainwater, supplemented by bore water for showers and washing clothes.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: As distances to sites of interest are short, cycling is the main means of transport on the island. Tourist activities include golf (9-hole), lawn bowls, tennis, fishing (including deep-sea game fishing), yachting, windsurfing, kitesurfing, kayaking, and boat trips (including glass-bottom tours of the lagoon). Swimming, snorkelling, and scuba diving are also popular in the lagoon, as well as off Tenth of June Island, a small rocky outcrop in the Admiralty group where an underwater plateau drops to reveal extensive gorgonia and black corals growing on the vertical walls. Other diving sites are found off Ball's Pyramid, away, where trenches, caves, and volcanic drop-offs occur.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Bushwalking, natural history tours, talks, and guided walks take place along the many tracks, the most challenging being the eight-hour guided hike to the top of Mount Gower. The island has 11 beaches, and hand-feeding the kingfish ("Seriola lalandi") and large wrasse at Ned's Beach is very popular. Walking tracks cover the island with difficulty graded from 1–5, they include—in the north: Transit Hill 2-hour return, ; Clear Place, 1– to 2-hour return; Stevens Reserve; North Bay, 4-hour return, ; Mount Eliza; Old Gulch, 20-minute return, ; Malabar Hill and Kims Lookout, 3 or 5-hour return, and—in the south: Goat House Cave, 5-hour return, ; Mount Gower, 8-hour return, ; Rocky Run and Boat Harbour; Intermediate Hill, 45-minute return, ; and Little Island, 40-minute return, . Recreational climbers must obtain permission from the Lord Howe Island Board.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Lying in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, the island is east of mainland Port Macquarie, northeast of Sydney, and about from Norfolk Island to its northeast. The island is about long and between wide with an area of . Along the west coast is a semienclosed, sheltered coral reef lagoon with white sand, the most accessible of the island's 11 beaches.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Both the north and south sections of the island are high ground of relatively untouched forest, in the south comprising two volcanic mountains, Mount Lidgbird () and Mount Gower which, rising to , is the highest point on the island. The two mountains are separated by the saddle at the head of Erskine Valley. In the north, where most of the population live, high points are Malabar () and Mount Eliza (). Between these two uplands is an area of cleared lowland with some farming, the airstrip, and housing.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The Lord Howe Island Group of islands comprises 28 islands, islets, and rocks. Apart from Lord Howe Island itself, the most notable of these is the pointed rocky islet Balls Pyramid, a eroded volcano about to the southeast, which is uninhabited by humans but bird-colonised. It contains the only known wild population of the Lord Howe Island stick insect, formerly thought to be extinct. To the north is the Admiralty Group, a cluster of seven small, uninhabited islands. Just off the east coast is Mutton Bird Island, and in the lagoon is the Blackburn (Rabbit) Island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island is the highly eroded remains of a 7-million-year-old shield volcano, the product of eruptions that lasted for about 500,000 years. It is one of a chain of islands that occur on the western rim of an undersea shelf, the Lord Howe Rise, which is long and wide extending from New Zealand to the west of New Caledonia and consisting of continental rocks that separated from the Australian plate 60 to 80 million years ago to form a new crust in the deep Tasman Basin. The shelf is part of Zealandia, a microcontinent nearly half the size of Australia that gradually submerged after breaking away from the Gondwanan supercontinent. The Lord Howe Seamount Chain is defined by coral-capped guyots stretching to the north of the island for and including the Middleton ( away) and Elizabeth ( away) reefs of the Elizabeth and Middleton Reefs Marine National Park Reserve. This chain of nine volcanic peaks was probably produced by the northward movement of the Indo-Australian Plate over a stationary hotspot, so the oldest guyots were the first formed and most northerly as the plate moved northward at a rate of per year (see plate tectonics).


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Two periods of volcanic activity produced the major features of the island. The first about 6.9 million years (Mya) ago produced the northern and central hills, while the younger and highly eroded Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird were produced about 6.3 Mya by successive basalt (an extrusive igneous rock) lava flows that once filled a large volcanic caldera (crater) and can now be seen as horizontal basalt strata on mountain cliffs (at Malabar and Mount Gower) occasionally interspersed with dikes (vertical lava intrusions). Geological pyroclastic remnants of volcanic eruption can be seen on the Roach Island (where the oldest rocks occur) and Boat Harbour as tuff (ash), breccia (with angular blocks), and agglomerate (rounded 'bombs'). Offshore on the Lord Howe Rise, water depths reach falling to to the west of the rise. From the dimensions of the rock on which the island stands, the island has been calculated to erode to 1/40th of its original size.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Rocks and land at the foot of these mountains is calcarenite, a coral sand, blown inland during the Pleistocene between 130,000 and 20,000 years ago and cemented into stratified layers by water percolation. In this rock are fossils of bird bones and eggs, land and marine snails, and the extinct giant horned turtle ("Meiolania platyceps") which is not closely related to any living kind of turtle. The crescent of the island protects a coral reef and lagoon; the barrier reef, at 31°30'S, is the most southerly in the world. Beach sands, rather than consisting of quartz grains derived from granite, as on the mainland, are made of fragments of shell, coral, and coralline algae, together with basalt grains, and basaltic minerals such as black diopside and green olivine. The lowland consists of alluvial soils.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The island continues to erode rapidly and is expected to be fully submerged within 200,000 years, taking an appearance akin to the Middleton and Elizabeth Reefs.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: In general, the summers are warm and humid with erratic rainfall, but occasionally heavy, while in winter it is very mild with rainfall more or less uniform. There is a gradual transition from summer to winter conditions and vice versa. Winds are frequent and salt-laden, being moderate easterlies in the summer and fresh to strong westerlies in the winter. July is the windiest month, and the winter months are subject to frequent gales and strong winds. The island has 67.8 clear days, annually.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Storms and occasional cyclones also affect the island. Rainfall records are maintained in the north, where rainfall is less than in the frequently cloud-shrouded mountains of the south. Wide variation in rainfall can occur from year to year. July and August are the coldest months with average minimum temperatures around and no frost. Average maximum temperatures range from in the winter to in the summer. The humidity averages in the 60–70% range year round, becoming more noticeable on warmer summer days than in the cooler winter months.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Lord Howe Island is a distinct terrestrial ecoregion known as the Lord Howe Island subtropical forests. It is part of the Australasian realm and shares many biotic affinities with Australia, New Guinea, and New Caledonia. In geological terms at 7 million years old, Lord Howe Island is relatively young and was never part of any continent, its flora and fauna colonising the island from across the sea, carried by wind, water, or birds, possibly assisted at a geological time when other islands were exposed, enabling island hopping. Nevertheless, it has been sufficiently remote for long enough to evolve endemic species.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The high degree of endemism is emphasised by the presence of five endemic genera: "Negria", "Lordhowea", "Howea", "Lepidorrhachis", and "Hedyscepe". Island plants are similar to those of Norfolk Island, the two islands sharing some endemic species, for example, the critically endangered species of creeping vine "Calystegia affinis". The combined flora of these two islands is more closely related to that of New Zealand and New Caledonia than to that of Australia. Also, a small but clear link exists with the plants of Vanuatu. The closest mainland affinities are with the vegetation of subtropical southeastern Queensland. A link with Gondwanaland is indicated by the presence of endemic species such as the wedding lily ("Dietes robinsoniana") whose only living relatives occur in South Africa.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The flora of the island is relatively untouched, with a large number of rare plants, 44% being endemic to the island. With a diversity of conditions ranging from valleys, to ridges, plains, and misty mountain tops, habitat is available for a wide range of plant communities, which have been comprehensively analysed and mapped. Many of the island's unique plants grow on or around the mountain summits, where the height has allowed the development of a true cloud forest and many different microhabitats, from sea level to the summits. With the increased humidity brought by the clouds on Mount Gower and the other mountain tops, the range of endemic plants include mosses, ferns and flowering plants.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: One of the best-known plant genera endemic to Lord Howe Island is "Howea", an endemic genus of palms (Arecaceae) that are commonly known as kentia palms and are popular houseplants. Mosses include Spiridens muelleri. There are 57 species of ferns, of which 25 are endemic: they are most abundant in the moist environments of the southern island, especially the higher parts of Mount Gower, perhaps the most apparent being the four endemic tree ferns in the genus "Cyathea" that occur on the southern mountains. "Hedyscepe" and "Lepidorrhachis" are the other two palm genera which are also endemic to the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Since the rodent eradication program, researchers have observed an increase in the amount of growth and seeds, especially of the "larger, fleshy, fruited plants", previously eaten by rats. As the understorey grows thicker, this in turn will provide habitat for small animals such as snails and insects, which in turn provide food for the birds.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Plant communities have been classified into nine categories: lowland subtropical rainforest, submontane rainforest, cloud-forest and scrub, lowland swamp forest, mangrove scrub and seagrass, coastal scrub and cliff vegetation, inland scrub and herbland, offshore island vegetation, shoreline and beach vegetation, and disturbed vegetation.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Several plants are immediately evident to the visitor. Banyan ("Ficus macrophylla" subsp. "columnaris") is a remarkable tree with a buttressed trunk and pendulous aerial roots; it can be seen on the track to Clear Place and near Ned's Beach. Pandanus tree ("Pandanus forsteri") has spectacular teepee-like prop roots and pineapple-like fruits that are orange-red when mature, the tough leaves being used for basketry. It occurs in damp areas such as creek beds, and fine specimens can be seen along the Boat Harbour track. Ten species of orchids are on the island, the most noticeable being the bush orchid ("Dendrobium macropus "subsp." howeanum") on lowland trees and rocks, bearing cream flowers from August to September. Other prominent flowering plants in the summer include, on the mountain slopes, the whiskery red flowers of mountain rose ("Metrosideros nervulosa" and "Metrosideros sclerocarpa"), the massed, small, yellow flowers of corokia ("Corokia carpodetoides"), orange, plump flowers of pumpkin tree ("Negria rhabdothamnoides"), and white spikes of Fitzgerald tree ("Dracophyllum fitzgeraldii"). The kava bush has large, aromatic, heart-shaped leaves. After heavy rain, the endemic glowing mushroom "Mycena chlorophanos", and "Omphalotus nidiformis", can be found in the palm forests.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: The palms are the signature plants of the island as the kentia and curly palms especially dominate the landscape in many places, the kentia being of special economic importance. All four species are endemic to the island, often occurring in dense, pure stands, the one that has proved such a worldwide success as an indoor plant being the kentia or thatch palm ("Howea forsteriana"). This is a lowland palm with drooping leaflets and seed branches in 'hands' of three to five, while the curly palm ("H. belmoreana"), which occurs on slightly higher ground, has upwardly directed leaflets and solitary 'hands'. Natural hybrids between these species occur on the island and a mature specimen of one is growing in the island nursery. On the mountain sides higher than about 350 m, the big mountain palm ("Hedyscepe canterburyana") occurs; it has large, golf ball-sized fruits, while the little mountain palm ("Lepidorrhachis mooreana") has marble-sized fruits and is only found on the mountain summits.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: No snakes nor highly venomous or stinging insects, animals, or plants occur, and no dangerous daytime sharks are found off the beaches, although tiger sharks have been reported on the cliff side of the island.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: A total of 202 different birds have been recorded on the island. Eighteen species of land birds breed on the island and many more migratory species occur on the island and its adjacent islets, many tame enough that humans can get quite close. The island has been identified by BirdLife International as an endemic bird area, and the Permanent Park Preserve as an important bird area, because it supports the entire population of Lord Howe woodhens, most of the breeding population of providence petrels, over 1% of the world population of another five seabird species, and the whole populations of three endemic subspecies.


title: Lord Howe Island

text: Fourteen species of seabirds breed on the island. Red-tailed tropicbirds can be seen in large numbers circling the Malabar cliffs, where they perform acrobatic courting rituals. Between August and May, thousands of flesh-footed and wedge-tailed shearwaters return to the island at dusk each day. From the Little Island Track between March and November, one of the world's rarest birds, the providence petrel, also performs courtship displays during winter breeding, and it is extremely tame. The island was its only breeding location for many years after the breeding colony on Norfolk Island was exterminated in the late 19th century, though a small population persists on the adjacent Phillip Island. The Kermadec petrel was discovered breeding on Mount Gower in 1914 by ornithologist Roy Bell while collecting specimens for Gregory Mathews and the black-winged petrel was only confirmed as a breeder in 1971; its numbers have increased following the elimination of feral cats from the island.