Received the last of eight daily emails from Peter Hendry, an expert with whom Doug White put me in contact, following a presentation of my DVD Looking Out For The Overlooked at the June Landcare meeting. In one of his emails he referred to difficulty with images. I thought he was referring to mine, but it turned out he was referring to some of the reference images used to identify my moths. I wonder if the Queensland Museum knows of him. I had some moths identified via the museum. This took quite a while. I sent Peter my email, with six moths for him to identify, in the morning and received a reply that afternoon.
At long last I heard from Katja Schulz again. She told me that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain is on the verge of becoming a Content Partner on EOL. She provided me with a preview of all the pages to which I have contributed images and it was a thrill to not only see the list but very pleasing to click on an entry and see my video frame on the page. I emailed her, pointing out a couple of errors and asked her if she wants me to go through all the pages before she publishes them.
My friend Robyn Ashwin phoned me to report a flock of Wompoo Pigeons feeding in a fig tree behind her house. The tree was not as big as the one next to Palm Grove where I filmed the Wompoos last July, so I was able to get better close ups this afternoon.
I received an email from the Greenscreen Festival stating that my entry had not been selected for screening. This came as no surprise given that entries are made by broadcasters and the like.
Last year we stopped our night filming on May 12. This year we are carrying on because the results continue to make it worthwhile, even if some of the creatures are hibernating. We continue to see possums and Leaf-tailed Geckos. Tonight, in Joalah, I filmed a spider securing its egg sac on a leaf suspended by a strand of web a metre from the ground. I then filmed a small snail which appeared to be growing a shell, although it had some of the characteristics of the semi/snail slug. Finally I got some good footage of the eel in the pool with the bridge. The water was much clearer than the first time I filmed the eel here. Of the golden orb spider there was no trace, just bedraggled bits of web. We arranged to film again in a fortnight.
Creating and upkeeping my Facebook page, and producing eleven new YouTube clips and the documentary for Greenscreen, has pushed writing articles for The Brisbane Institute to one side. My first article this year for The Brisbane Line is titled Ignorance. I want to write a piece called My First Two Hours in Portugal before I travel overseas. You can read Ignorance here.
IGNORANCE
Where to begin? On the face of it, my profound ignorance should amply qualify me to write this article. Boy, do I know about being ignorant, although ironically, it requires a person far less ignorant than me to get to grips with the subject. Confronting one’s ignorance is rather dispiriting; much better not to dwell on it. My Concise Webster’s does not define ignorance. It merely lists the word as the noun for ignorant, which is defined as – without knowledge; uninformed; resulting from want of knowledge.
I consider myself reasonably well educated. But I was forced to face my own ignorance while reading Jenny Uglow’s superb book, ‘The Lunar Men’ about an inspiring group of friends who lived in and around Birmingham during the second half of the 18th century and who visited… Read Complete Text
I last heard from Katja Schulz on March 11. Dallas emailed her the changes he had made on April 11. I emailed her on April 22 asking her if EOL had received his email. I emailed her again on May 13. And now I have sent her an email titled ‘Limbo’, because that is where I appear to be with EOL. Katja has tended to be quite prompt in replying to my emails, so this silence is out of character, rather worrying and by now unacceptable.
This morning I screened ‘One Small Place On Earth . . .’ at the May meeting of the Probus Club attended by about 50 members. It may be its one and only screening. The documentary seemed to be well received and there were plenty of questions afterwards.
I decided to film the golden orb spider I had filmed two nights ago in Joalah, when Steve took footage of me filming and Jaap talking about why he loves spotlighting. This was a species more common further north. The spider had been extremely active at night. Now it was motionless in the middle of the web. Nearby was a fallen, seemingly dead branch, several metres long, sprouting new growth, which I filmed. A bonus was a male and female Log Runner, a medium sized ground-foraging bird, which I filmed in the undergrowth.