NewsTracker Answers for week of Jan. 18, 2021

Q: A pigeon nicknamed Joe that Australia had declared a biosecurity risk received a reprieve from a death sentence after a U.S. bird organization declared that its identifying leg band was fake. Where is Australia?

Circle the area on this map


Q: On the basis of that leg band, Australian officials originally thought the bird came from the Oregon and posed a disease risk. Joe had been found in Melbourne, the second largest city in Australia. Which city is the nation’s largest?

A. Adelaide

B. Brisbane

C. Canberra

D. Sydney


D. Greater Sydney has 5.3 million people, about 300,000 more than faster-growing Greater Melbourne. The man who found and fed the emaciated pigeon in his backyard said he named the bird Joe after President-elect Joe Biden when he thought it was from the United States.


Q: In the nation’s capital, acting Australian Prime Minister Michael McCormack had earlier said there would be no mercy if the pigeon was from the United States. What is the capital city of Australia?

A. Adelaide

B. Brisbane

C. Canberra

D. Sydney


C. While national leaders in Canberra were taking a hard line on Joe, the Victoria state health minister in Melbourne plead for mercy for the bird. Officials speculated that the pigeon may have crossed the Pacific Ocean as a stowaway on a ship from Oregon to Australia.


Q: Australian quarantine authorities are notoriously strict. The long-isolated continent has suffered significant environmental damage from invasive species such as rabbits. Which of these invasive species did NOT arrive after Europeans reached Australia?

A. Cane toads

B. Feral cats

C. Red foxes

D. Wild dogs


D. The dingo is a medium-sized dog that arrived in Australia at least 3,450 years ago, long before Europeans first reached the Australia in 1606. While some dingoes were domesticated by Australia’s first aboriginal people, they also roamed wild. Officials now believe Joe is from Australia, where pigeons also are an invasive species.


Q: The movement of plant and animal species across the globe have changed environments for good and bad for millions of years. Zebra mussels from southern Russia and Ukraine invaded U.S. waters in the 1980s. This has been ...

A. Good

B. Bad

C. Both


C. It is believed the small freshwater-filtering mussels were brought to the Great Lakes in the ballast water of ships from Europe. They spread though around North American fouling boats, clogging pipes and causing damaging weed growth. But, they also supplied food for other animals and increased the numbers of yellow perch, smallmouth bass and endangered lake sturgeon.