Australia's an amazing place. Big, old and flat, with a propensity for truffles, and native species well-adapted to sniffing them out, as the The Canberra Times reports:
"Truffles? Yes, these pointy-nosed forest foragers are Australia's truffle hounds, with a taste for some 60 species of native truffles that can be soft or hard-bodied and range in size from a golf ball to a pea. "You could call them truffle junkies or truffle gourmands. I've seen areas where fungi was fruiting that were so extensively dug over that it could only be called frenzied activity," Claridge says. Australia has between 500 and 1000 bush truffles, some with fragrant odours like garlic, vanilla or cinnamon. Others exude a pungent whiff of "rotting fish or diesel fumes". Potoroos and bandicoots are "basically a nose on legs" and seem to be able to sniff out truffle sites from some distance, Claridge says.
I'll settle for mice, and I can report that they are greatly reduced in numbers this year.
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